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

Before the choking
comes the panting!

governmental papers don’t shake panting
nor do rehearsive, defensive, grape-shot remarks by the juror to the juvenile

Everything pants. Every-thing everything.

          I see panting in the ridiculous,
the bold and the quietly obscene survival antics of the praying mantis.
bearing its hooked-green claws
into the thorax of her devoted lover,
quickly and hungrily chewing into his protesting mouth,
while her belly rolling in such an excitable feast of delight,
shimmers with a soft, expired trophy
          of semen wetness

          I see a sea panting,
panting waves upon a rock and its cool thumping of chunking ejaculate:
white spray and foam-flecked with sperm-tailed sand
riding straight and
true In the perfect way of united thundering cavalry;
cavalry chasing and cavalry being chased by a flagging storm-cloud,
grey & brooding
with its average mid-life crisis
and recklessly tailing a white, blistering three-wheeled
          Ford Capri with beaten and savaged hub-caps

          I see panting in a distant metropolis, licked by this sea, city-lights
panting to a tune of hungry inhabitants,
inhabitants craving the beat-thirsty for experience
and the divine way of swallowing family Sunday breakfast sausages down
before spilling the “in-out” loving thing across twisted sweat-loaded
blankets,
And there’s just way too much cum for the grass to hide,
          my precious darling!

          I see my hand panting, jerking the sublime
entrapment of ink across the
scaffolds of these
                                   brilliant, brilliant white pages
with shadow of images and the noise made by rotund, elderly plumbers
with legs of broken spanners screaming to be returned
to the strength of youth and a still-functioning kidney
          no longer free of dark pebbles piled in a stream of glowing sputum

          I see my throat panting,
the tubes of my ears panting,
my tongue still panting and pushing for release
from its morally-caged dungeon of
molar and drool,
my lips posting high-pitched, skinny, gorgeous, pale Laura

one
short,
black kiss

to her cheek last Friday night
and desperately clawing for another perfectly-staged argumentative
performance,

Oh Encore! Encore!

The oft-neglected Encore!

Deliver me an Encore with a silver platter of creamed
pepper cheese and the curved berry-like breasts of Laura.
Again and again and again!
A bittersweet and beautifully-unattainable woman!
          (Aren’t they all?)
          I damn you with my hooked & baited smiling mouth

          I see panting in the smooth-shape & moony eyes of men.
Men oppressed.
This is a kind of panting, a slow-sure-gradual-kind-of-panting,
a panting that has the patience of
snow-bearded, dark-skinned Worimi Elders: wholesome, wise and
observant,
          the blue-lipped Lord of Winter kind-of-panting!

          I see panting when a woman rests her
cake-like, sweat-filled head to the chili of pillow-cover,
a hand brushing locks from her face,
her face of determined wisdom not quite reaching a hand trembling to the
tune of soon-to-be loss.
A hand fearing sensitive to fATE.
Her cheek twitching across yellow salt pans and skies shot
with the coagulating scent of fuel
          orphaned from jet-fighters

          I see panting in the light freedom of thoughts
woken and floating within the room of mind,
whispering and stirring
like the white, downy feathers that inhabit my friend April’s rundown
sleeping mattress,
the same white, downy feathers which have
fallen onto this page, white as the bright, silent death of Hiroshima
          in a numb mid-century August

          I see panting in the way the old diggers
in some far west of April
with eyes closed and pinned to the green arms of scented rosemary
soak the listening fabric of their rum & coffee handkerchiefs
with 82 year
snubbed,
running-for-cover
protests,
protests shot into the bolted head of the RSL sub-branch president
and his recycled nationalist, capitalist rendition of a
let’smakeitswift

causei’mthebusyman

Lestweforget!

He’s got it all wrong! He’s got it all wrong, again,
The bloody twit! Got it all wrong!

Mr. Dollars wouldn’t know comradeship if he corked
his arse and let forth a personal collective interest of
gas and fucking shit!

(Say a few words fellas, you’ve seen a war for Christ’s sake!)

          I see the panting of lips on the teetering rims of beer glasses,
a fluctuated-kind-of-panting!
dictated by the rule of money and opportunity,
the socially-depraved-kind-of-panting!
Men drinking lonely sex: an elastic library of thought stretching home to
pillows
of flapping fish,
fish beating heads and tails to the universal beat of craving,
heads beached and beating
          into the open blackness of a Ugandan night sky

          I see a disgraceful panting, a 9-to-5-kind-of-panting!
The-broken-part-of-mainstream-consumer-culture-kind-of-panting!
where the sun no longer beats on sweating heads,
where the sickle remains unhoned and undusted
where the play is caught performing like A BROKEN DOWN
RECORD .... A BROKEN DOWN RECORD .... A BROKEN DOWN RECORD ....
          an-Act-III-end-of-the-road-kind-of-panting!

          I see the panting of breasts and women fastening
both men and children,
luring to the comforting haven of both pleasures
and nutrition,
a-tongue-roasting-lip-sucking-boob-&-flesh-kind-of-panting!

Boobs!                 Boobs!                 Boobs!
My broken goblet for a nest of boobs

A soft nest of boobs
smooth,
soothing
and deliberately playing Enya,
(Enya with her sweet feminine voice and ball-munching sopranos)

and red, dwarven candles

dripping and flicking dark shadowy patches like cards
around a small wooden table with splinters
and legs of thorn
reaching into my gastro-intestinal self
and raining milk across my nakedness,
corking some 2 min,
          awkward and uncontrollable erection

          I see panting as a measurement, a shattering of time for space,
routine for spiritual harvest,
a needful panting to find a voice which speaks and
writes, expresses and raises Itself to a collective scream,
a wail, a voice salvaged from a beaten whimper broken in the Industrial
Revolution of Century 19.
The blasting howl of one wolf’s mouth
is significant,
the poised, spasmodic howling from a collective pack
          is more significant!

          I see panting offering the solutions to those who ignore it,
Panting coming from the same wolves feared by
Old-Man-Mutton-Chops Senator Coiston,
(plenty of flesh on this big-boned, greedy man!)
And others like Howard and Hanson from the same club who see honesty
as pieces of holed-in remnants of decayed wood,
occasionally stuck with rusting screws to resemble a little more than
ordinary,
toasting away the frayed diplomatic edges between him and the other
conforming fellow
with working-class finger-nails, blackened but strong,
          strong when demanded of

          I don’t see panting in the eyes of those searching for tools &
patches
to repair broken-down dreams,
tools inside the paparazzi-laced, soporific stupor of Hollywood
motion pictures,
Rollins spoke of a girl walking on in the same stupor
of brainwashed stardom,
dare not look down for you may be confronted with the pill called reality,
it is a saw-toothed pill, a black and red pill, a pill run-down,
a pill which has indeed rolled past forgotten family dynasties with empires
in subways and Gorbals slums,
old and forgotten and the unique body language seen in trash blowing
across
Oxford St in London,
Oxford St in Sydney,
Oxford St in New Lambton
          and Oxford

          I see the lost discover their own kind of panting,
pronouncing identity and sensing the unharvested, neglected
                                                                                 down-trodden
leaves of tulips and roses,
(unremarkable by-products)
but like the garbage, these leaves shyly yap and bite their names
into the calves of professional class businessmen,
businessmen with jet-black upper-lip moustaches
          (fatally resembling Hitler) and
holding newspapers and foam cups with hot hot Andronicus,
the bites fester and make the men wander off,
confused into conformity and selfish individualism.
They drop their loose wives,
children, to the local council depot,
          preferring an outta-the-way, dick-stirring drive for some take-away

          I see panting through blood-coloured glasses,
the blood of decent rage and the smell of smoked pig amongst the broad
leaves of trees loading up my nostrils,
it’s coming to me! it’s coming to me! and
it’s coming from a dead age like Meiji or Stuart
where the peaceful boucans are trying to eat with bloodied mouthfuls and
cheeks clotting with imperialist
double-edged
Spanish steel,
steel worked by hands of pride,
a useless pride to see blood painted across the works of art,
fashioned and life-timed,
          the Bu & Bun

          I see panting in corpses, corpses twisted in varied forms of suicide,
lying in several rows of a regimented formation of protest beside the chill
steps of Parliament House,
one corpse standing with a beard,
and closely resembling a murdered Joseph Byrne, Jesus Christ,
or a shaven Roni Levi;
they demand that the P.M. and his troupe of blonde, air-headed, girl-
Fridays
officially establish a roll of remembrance
for their betrayed lives,
juxtaposing the honour roll of the pink-happy, pig-faced ministers,
extending and neighbouring the betrayed lives of lost, dead or found
          servicemen, servicemen from the ages

          I see panting as being beautiful and dangerous,
an Ides-of-March-kind-of-panting!
Ides which have come and not yet gone!
With cauldrons and herbed brews exposing faces of the betrayed,
swirling heads,
dismembered and half-sunk with brows burning napalm.
A hidden light is shone through many stubbed and pocketted lives,
lives panting and powerful,
          a dagger-thrust-kind-of-panting!

          I see panting in the Poplar poets of England,
Sims’ Christmas Day At The Workhouse blazing across
a century of changes and a shuffling of leadership papers,
flies buzzing around some bodies blown out of wars
where the pen topples the sabre,

the playwrights Ibsen, Brecht, Miller and The Crucible
and the poets of the strong, untouchable, unforgettable great red bear,
carried by the four striding legs of

Blok.
           Mayskovaky.
                                   Mandelstam.
                                                           Yevtushenko.

          I see Steinbeck, Shaw and Hemingway panting,
leading politicians and the faber poets out by strands of the severed
Gordian Knot
and into the remains of the Circus Maximus,
granting each
a Carcano rifle,
a copy of Shelley’s Men of England. 1817
a V.C. for any who can withhold the itchy compulsion
to hold a pen and tick away more lives
on the yellowed, hasty and recycled conscription ledgers held by two
immensely smiling
immense
Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders, both with hands scented
from those deliciously secret 11 herbs and spices,
with fingers crumbed and deep-fried
and voicing an opportunity for all participants
to collectively purchase a small ration of bread & dripping for each
man or woman who survives any shooters
          (authorised I unauthorised)

          I see panting in greasy electric globes,
brown and yellow globes mapping poetry on the page,
globes burning on hair-wires mistaken for ‘the MUSE’,
globes burning the flayed minds of poets in their 23rd working hour
of the world,

their poetry torn
like raw meat
from a thousand brittle beaks
and the hacked feet of Islaington sparrows,
from the still, careful fingers and limbs of gynaecologists and coal-miners
at No.1
and from the builders of stony aqueducts,
A globes-Granting-poetry-its-righteous-explosive-place-in-the-earwax-of-
          the-trying-to-listen-world-kind-of-panting!

          I see panting in poetry, poetry that is timeless:
Dawe’s On the Shadow of a Japanese Child . . . ,
Ito’s Red Candle,
Corrie's Women are waiting tonight
Toller’s To the living
The song of the shirt and The song of the low by Hood and Jones

and all the other voices whispering to the ignorant, the lame,
          and only the forgotten seem to understand

          I see panting on the shadows of walls,
walls which speak in blood, walls dreaded by all liberationists:

Mandela,
                       Biko.
                                      the Guildford Four,
                                                                          Nestor Cerpa,

the years of Kooris like Yock
beaten to death
by a fascist,
black-hating
white fist!

Walls with razor-wire and a clamped inventory of numerous twisted skins
and strangled sinews,
stripped and stolen from prisoners desperate for freedom.
          Jailbirds walled and locked within a society which is locked!

          I see panting in the way the machete cuts the flesh of promised
political fruit
and people do take momentary notice,
they still possess some beautiful, borrowed ruby,
a ruby torching of hope!
          (while the need, of course, is clear in their eyes)
a breath of pine needles swims into view,
untouched by the occasional hands of faltering progress,
then that typical I’m-banging-the-lonely-bitch-next-door severing of trust
          (so touched by these people)
that somehow it is altered
          and removes the workable thumb of the culprit

          I believe panting to be as necessary as the revolutionary natures of
bush-fires,
the chain thrusting of spawn breached from the vast
blooming head of a mushrooming and explicitly retiring
white, middle-class, DINK phallus,
          and in its vacuous wake of assassinated greed and silent empty,

          These Panting Flames arrive, flames of hope!
And not even a fascist dictator like Hitler, hiding under the false
red cloak of Socialism (to lure the trusting masses of the Proletarians).
could even admit to such possible death of hope.

Oh sweeping,
                          panting Flames of a Thousand Cities and Fortifications!

Alexandria, Mycenae, Troy, Athens. Sparta, Tenochtitlan, Stockholm,
Constantinople. Prague and Rimbaud’s shimmering sliver cities,
shimmering a brand new day,
reed of flowing GONO!
And the clotting cathedrals of the expensive, commercial gold crucifix,
and the pope, the abbots and ministers
crawling around with syphilis smiles, copulating in the name of
Notre Dame,
the money markets,
Swiss banks and Wall Street bourses with savaged dreams.
while negligibly blinking away
Scottish, Welsh and Albanian urns containing the long-forgotten ashes of
Socialist heroes whose lives,

stolen through culturally-dredging policies of Ancient Mesopotamia,
the United Arab Emirates, the Tyrol.
Romanised Transalpine Gaul, Ancient Egypt
and mmm....yes. Britain.

Britain.

with its wrinkled lip and brow covered in thinning, grey locks,
(looking a little like Robert Graves)
and sighted:
skulking away from Hong Kong,
its embarrassing colonial history like a
half-decayed,
fly-blown.
toothless vulture
dragging on a retreating back!

Britain.

where the kings have returned to finish chewing away the remains of
Habeas Corpus,
Britain.

where the Magna Carts was last seen sliding off a wall with a jewelled
dagger in its throat!
and tears still sinking Hulks of the Thames,
the Triremes of Tiberius,
homes never owned by the homeless!

from the Butcher of Baghdad to the Butcher from the broken stars &
shattered bloodied stripes,
stripes which built a fragmenting 20th Century Pacific Empire
and looking vaguely like a slave’s whipped back!

all the butchers indeed who have knotted freedom and locked it away from
children in their jailed playground of various flags of nation-states,
children thinning from
physical,
psychological,
mental,
spiritual malnutrition and disarray.

Children with heads and mouths
stomped by pitch boots,
stomped into a cracked arrangement of unscrambled eggs

AND I CAN NO LONGER IGNORE
THE GLOBAL INDIGENOUS WAIL!
I CAN NO LONGER IGNORE THE GLOBAL INDIGENOUS WAIL!

Ohh Herodotus, even a retarded tongue can speak of injustice!

And so all around we await! We await
the first spark of revolutionary fires....

Red Flames which come,
clearing the dead buildup of Old Father Capitalism’s
forlorn decayed matter,
(matter bereft entirely of Dionysian
fertility,
happiness,
growth and harvest).

And on their arrival we shall drink!
drink of hope, promise and for the sake of freedom,

freedom
          for those ripening Spring seeds and the warm mead of grand youth!