Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

He has eyes for everyone:
but especially for himself:
he keeps watch on countless hearts:
but especially on his own:
he has counted many wrongs,
and judged himself most wrong of all:
he has settled in the mire
with a set of pinking-shears:

I knew him well,
long time ago,
we came to talk of many things:
he’d settle himself in an armchair
and, flouting logic,
he’d refute
every adage in the book;
every principle I held so dear
swept clean away with a contemptuous sneer:
my axiomatic ties
were wearing short:
we’d meet on Tuesdays
beneath the grey willow bridge,
our coming-together was pre-ordained,
it seemed, to me, immaculate

it was only later I learned
he’d done this with other guys:
but then, in a way,
my Romantic Disappointment
is so fitting:
my final hopeful fluke
has been trod upon.

He was like a Demon Brother to me:
his word was his bond,
so every utterance would choke me
like a vine
thrust into stony soil:
he seemed to be living in
my mirror-world
whose inexorable logic

is innately hostile to mine, yet
some dark tie of kinship
entwines: I was, and am,
inextricably drawn to him
as to a dark glass:

the Promise!
the Promise of that glass lip!

To say he didn’t penetrate
would be a lie.
True, seen legally
we barely touched;
(we rarely brush, and when we do,
invisibly,
it’s like
passing through each other,
my Brother and I,
we mingle
like black mist
                  speckles
through a frame);

he penetrates me everyday;
and I him.

I thought that he would rule me,
I would give myself away
to his malignant thrusts,
I thought I’d be the prisoner
             of his perverse desires;
annihilate myself
in his dark hole

But no,
it isn’t so;
he only wants
to reach out to me and play

Now I feed him every day
with green grapes;
he feeds me blue:
if I catch him
poring through his tombes,
I read too; I switch on the light:

and when I see him in the street,
say hello.