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

UNFINISHED DRAWINGS

You’re tight on the hard shoulder; black slick asphalt. Sentiment is irrelevant now. Slipstreaming, lost in the dream. Freedom is what we want for you, they say, when what you know they mean is don’t take any risks that might make our lives look tame. There’s a face in the mirror, shaking Into fragments and reshaping. You don’t think it’s yours, before or after. Tyreburn; radials on exhausted air. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose and that’s right: what is there to fear? Ah, but once roses bloomed in your footprints: you haven’t forgotten.

Flower festival, relevant books; you are welcome to join us

GIVE SPACE TO THE INSTINCTIVE

Postcards: endings and beginnings gathered on this table. I’m thinking lupins and lupus, hydrangeas, the colour of longing and grieving. A garden seat. Wolves. Arctic hares coats. Flashes of wintry sun. Light scattered off leaves, glancing of f walls, glancing of blackness (never enough darkness to extinguish a single candle). And then the red of fiery places: comets, meteorites, the spark of sperm and ovum. Bowl, sunswollen, of physalis and starfruit. A doorway into apis Aegean. And back with lupins, lupine, lupus. The same word for wolf and cancer - outlawed, prowling the margins.

Beneath the tongue a form of silence

CROSSING THE LOWLANDS

Already we’re yesterday’s news. Times when even depression becomes depthless - been down so long it looks like up to me. Sometimes you need to wear red. Then suddenly coming into the borderlands; the green flood of us scattered quickening to the four quarters. Emerging, made new. There, see, where the sun breaks through and ignites the edges of things. Nothing ever lost; never too late. Only temporary abdication, an underexposed negative ghosting the waters of the developing bath.

Back-and-forth (another continent); in possession of loss

HARD SHOULDER

All over then. Above us, a dusty crow nailed to the sky; below, the road without end. Today, patience gone, I made you sit on the stairs. You cried because I shouted so loud then left you. The universe and your experience are expanding at an astonishing pace. I forget everything except now, let anger escape out the back where the dark arm of bonfire smoke disfigures the day. I take off my hat and hang it by the door. Home is a crowd of people and books; I don’t get time for music any more.

So easy, so unretractable; death sliding out of the sky

NO ONE WANTS TO LISTEN

I am wanting to preserve this silence; the cool eye at the heart of the spinning day. Pickle the moment: something like souse it in white; let it breathe its halo, a saucer of white around an inner whirl around a further, stiller, place (imagine a heat so hot that everything stops, frozen, even the cartwheeling planets). Go so far. Examine naked truths, make them walk, embrace them and shout about them. Make impossible wishes. Belly the ground for a snail’s eye view; hitch a flight on a meteorite, cavort with something dangerous. Come back singing; come back remade.

Wheat, tideline, earth and desert rain