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

     On Sinday the 16th of John-n-Mary at the Almighty Theatric in Drizzlington, the manual T.S. Elegant Reprizal for Pottiness held a red herring for the ten-ton finalists. Under the able table of chair Bloke Montebonk, the Pottiness Bunk Sublimity held its annual graveyard mumble to contradunk the event. Shockwaves slouched through the ordinance: not a surprize to be hid. As rigged as a first rate gulleon, the show waltzed on water. Even less amazing, the guessing gomble begun: Who of the ten best deserved reproozal?

     Spivving red sneakers, Bloke Montebonk gave waves to the first finalist, Tin ‘Saint’ Paul in spikey Ulster logorrhoea namedrop syndrone. Too clever by half of what wasn’t there. Carrot who Art in Huffy wasn’t there either. Two standins read her mythopoeic self-enlargements, a necessary ploy in view of their microscopic authorority. Saul Durkan converted the audience, like a rugby ball kicked over the high H of his heroism. Sirly Bloke Montebonk and his Adam’s Angels, the Judges, would fund Durkan empty of merit and so award him the reproval? Not on your television.

     A chap called Michael Lasky strayed in from the world of decent people, competant pottiness. No chance. As every child’s news, that which is good, fabulous, brilliant, is called wicked, monstrous, evil. And so it is in the world of pottiness, that which is wicked, monstrous, evil, is called good, fabulous, brilliant. A woman cold Anne Carton numbed a standin to purple her prose. So if it wanted pottiness itself, it yet had a half-baked sucker of Hercules boring the pants off Europa.

     The second half was also dynalite. It lay like a stiff stick on the flower. Rolling around invisibly, it did not explode the dugnifooled Cathleen Jammy, who turned the muse of Medea into the muse of museum. Tolerable on lochs. C.Q. Willyums trailed long lines of New York ticker-tape, each the length of a stretch limo. The long applause was for hum, a disqualifiable defence. Enter Michel Hoffmarn voided by a standin. We heard the funicular culturule sicko phanting his dead father yes again. The smartarse cold fish reproach to pottiness drained dustbelief to the drugs: viz. this sure-fiver whipper of the just amuser. Thank god for Saint Bernard O’Dunnalot, whose charming stoop, sleek miscarriage of dottiness, and brazier briskness, kept him exiled from the gongland killing fields of unyearned cheeks.

     When it came to Youknow Wiglumbs, the eternal research student in the Thames Littoral Subsoil, words failed him. He was as flat as a flounder, although less animate. He was not even not interesting. The marvel was his pottiness was so absent as to have the Real Presence of the True Absence about it. Close by home, at the interrational hostilitipples, stood another wunderkruel, Aladdin Junkins. Aladdin Junkins slipped his arms around the neck of Bloke Montebonk, god wot. Montebonk, Wiglumbs, and Junkins, co-handers in co-pocketbooks at the aforesequinned T.L.especiallyuS., have amassed more in what is after all Aladdin’s cave than we’ve got skeletons in our ideas. Ever seen a Heavy Reprizal not stunning from those toes? Once? Twice? Never! That’s because they’ve got everything stitched up, except the emperors’ new sleaze.

     The next dial, Anthrax ‘Mobile Phone’ Emocean, the Potty Lariat, lassoed The Times art corresdespondent Damya Albilge to commusicate his pining: “The T.S. Elegant Reprizal for Pottiness is the one most of us disserve.” Mrs. Vale-of-Tears Elegant, widow of T.S.E., blind-folded in a sound-proof carbuncle, nodded the 5000 black-handers through to Youknow Wiglumbs, who commuted: “Not even this will cause me to like my stuff.” Nor us. He who lies by the word, dies by the word. The pug-eyed Rude Puddle dripped into being at the sincerity withheld at the Brutish Liebrasserie. She suckled all by slaying the outlawed: “That was the strongest list of finalists the world has ever seen.” The world popped a plumbline into her dropdead gawdless north and south: straight as a shepherd’s crook or crinkle. She who lies by the word, dies by the word.

     The day was beloved of our Bloke Montebonk, howother. He reparked of the whinnying volumet, Willy’s Brain, by the certifoolable Wiglumbs (certilyfriable for his ‘inverted’ geninuts, that is): “the book’s demobbable happiness, its nudity, its tapering off to a toning, jump start from a pottiness of pure potential, at the beginning, to a pottiness of pure potential, at the end. This remarks it without question the whimper by a whisky from Michel Hoffmarn, the thoughtless man’s guide to dead fathers and (it was close) deathless dullness.” Zeus O’Brighten, the poleaxe and cricket, summed up the winnow’s wonderworld: “minimalism in the service of less, less in the service of zero.” Wiglumbs himself was born, lived, and passed out. He never took to drink. He never took to life. He passed through it like a postcard sideways in a crowd. He never took to crowds. He slipped away unnoticed – with the cash.

[Nartorius]