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

Centre of the world, a petty god and crazy too.
A lullaby, a loony tune
a set of dark bells tampering with blankets,
fabrics of the truth.

Men with armies don’t control my workforce in this place,
they don’t command me with their drugs
when I am here to stop and they don’t chain me down to beds
and they don’t lock me in at night.

I am running all, running wild and I won’t lie
it hurts a lot like needles when I make it, but when I do I
have a whole big field of white ruins
to create, cells of bells peal out dark scores. Flowers and
water and a low bright sun to run through
to get out of here, a place for me to run to.

So speaks you to me, or God, to me.

It is not my time to starve, or seize up, so I wake up.
It is true that the image is only a crutch in my mind and
really I am cut, unravelled and untidy,
messed like bloody thorns with torn
hands blue with cheese and mess of hair.

Waking up to scorch and black, my consciousness is
dimpled, soft like water (yet who withstands the raging flood?)
briefly hardy, lucid Lucy not for long in burnt out rooms
in rooms of hate of fate of rape.

You can laugh at me.
I know that I am out there with the fishes, transatlantic,
so pacific and I swim with you, on holiday. After long I am
weighted down by blue weed round my boots and ankles
and I weep.
I sleep it isn’t funny.

I care I care that my blue wreckage is
a heaven and a lie, I care so deeply when I fly
that I know I am not there, and I should
run, and when I fling myself from
columns into catacombs (my innuendo friend)
I am chased by ghosts and
fall
and break my back.