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

1

I am the one
your troubled secret
found in stone,

subversive, sly,
a fierce delight,
bristling among

the buttresses and piers,
the bland hosannas
of God’s ordered masonry.

Obscure, obscene,
I squeeze between
the pieties.

My face a grimace,
knuckled, clenched, or stretched
in splay-mouth antics,

I mock and mirror fears
your fisted mind
can barely guess.

Bubble-eyed
or buttock-spread,
a hare-lipped rictus

for a grin,
I dump my mischief
where your grief is,

smack the mean-arsed look
your mind is pinched
or sniggered in.

2

I am the base erotic,
grossly hung.
I hump or finger,

grope with anyone.
Woman, child,
or beast or man,

whatever drives
my lechers on.
I suck where the juice is.

Top or bottom,
back or front,
resisting it

or willing it,
love’s a hole
and filling it.

3

I am your rage,
your loveless zeal,
your law and Sunday bigot;

a hate-shaped noise
giving you head, a word
swallowing you whole.

Commie, Nigger
Fascist, Jew,
Faggot, Spick or Heretic! -

whatever shadow’s
bitching you,
I am your furies,

your terror
screaming back
at you!

4

I am your leader,
the chosen mob of one.
I sleepwalk

where you follow
into an emptiness
called man
.
I summon rhetoric
like human sorrow
out of the howling air.

I’m God is dead
and no tomorrow.
I’m every crime you bear,

the gutted world,
your neighbour’s blood,
the riot mad with slaughter;

the midnight knock,
a cry somewhere,
your conscience under curfew.

Worship me.
I am history
repeating you.