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

Two academics for Dumpton Park
aiming at Margate before it's dark,
fluent in French, "tu prefer un Tokay?"
in Styrofoam cups from the station buffet:
adventurous thinkers on an Awayday;
intellectualised Biggles, a camp Hannay.
The cleverest laughter, the pointedest talk,
they swig from the bottle and sniff at the cork,
chirping at Brecht as we wobble through Kent
(no socks and check-trousers) ebulliently bent.

                                          * * * *

There is a Crown, gouged from the chalk on a hillside over Wye,
that stares on Christian pilgrims: it is a glassy grassy eye.
It gawped at the Hindenburg, on Chaucer, it smiles on passengers
(much as it smiled on Churchill down from Chartwell
to see Canterbury after the Baedeker). It sees all. It looked the same
at the first straining, 'plaining, spraining, groaning train.
The carriages carry a million thoughts and scratchings in their dust,
Dungy daydreams, pollutions of an old man’s solitary must.
More: escapes, retreats, advances, entrances and perversions,
entreaties and repulses, as the scabbed seats harden
— dirty little schoolboys perfecting dirty little diversions —
and a hundred lost divinities between Staplehurst and Marden.
The Crown has watched a thousand one-way, pier-bound                                                                                              excursions.
(But the point becomes much looser between Paddock Wood and
    Dover
and every journey seems the longer for being almost over.)

                                              * * * *

Anthony brings out chocolate cake
that Grandma made then forgot to bake.
The baguettes are finished, the wine’s all done.
Tom pulls from his satchel a bottle of rum.
Chin-chin.

                                              * * * *

It’s 32 years since I made my first journey in the opposite direction
drowsing over “The Whitsun Weddings’, 12 years old,
relieved to be clicking toward a purple West Riding moor.
I stopped for a sandwich, my first time at Charing Cross,
and a bitch behind the counter whined,
“How long do I have to watch these pigs eat?”
God, I’m sure that woman must be long dead.
Things happen.

                                              * * * *

“Joanne is too jokey and Dicky’s a dick
but Jarvis, when sober, behaves like a prick.
I think we’re at Ashford.”
                                     “I’m going to be sick.”
Two academics off on a bunk,
randy and paunchy and doggedly drunk.
Tom spills Captain Morgan on his vest,
“Once I shat in a litter bin at Canterbury West.”
Then he shouts from the window, it’s off his chest,
“I’m dreadfully sorry for that frightful mess.”
It must have been horrid.
We go on.

                                              * * * *

There’s a train across an ocean: The City of New Orleans
transports continental hopes across the continent of dreams.
There are bigger faster machines on rails, whose guards never sleep,
whose passengers aren’t English, whose whistle doesn’t weep,
that has more room, well, to be less cramped, less circumspect,
more straightforward than a difficult island’s diffident regret.
I reflect, I’ve never ridden on the Marrakech Express,
the Stamboul Train, the Scotsman, The Spirit of The West:
if asked — do I regret it? — the answer would be, yes.

                                              * * * *

“Chomsky’s a bugger and Auden’s a prat,
Snelling is boring and Hopper’s a twat.”
Anthony belches and gobs in his hat.
We slur into Margate, it’s starting to rain.
“We cycled to Broadstairs. Let’s do it again.
Remember our turn-ups full of Kentish grain?”
“Preppy and Buggy and Monica came,
Sam sniggered parodies of Verlaine...”
“.... and Harriet’s knickers got caught in the chain.”
We forgo the bottle and fall off the train.