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

A man in white shirt and pants who never gets a spot of dirt on them
working 40 hours a week on a grinding machine
while a million dollars sits in his bank account
A man with the orange splashes of molten steel
from the 1-ton bar he is cutting with a torch
shooting up all around him as he says,
‘Goddamned son of a bitch!’
all night
In the heart of an asphalt sea of tin factory buildings
On graveyard shifts like other planets
men
with missing fingers or eyes or torn-up legs
or no family
for 3,000 miles sit
high up in control cages running up the tracks
of 50-foot-high metal-cutting machines
or crouched before 2-ton drop hammers
that explode like bombs all night
a few feet from their faces
A Chinaman in a big straw hat with a beatific smile
always stretched across his face who rides
his rickety bicycle to and from a steel mill for years
until he suddenly drops dead of a bleeding ulcer
or old alcoholic machinists everyone hates
who cry
over the cuteness of their little dogs
A man
with both children dead from gang bullets hanging onto a machine handle
        when there is no other way
to go on
A scarred man hard as nails with 40 years of biker jamboree patches
on his black leather jacket
and a snow-white beard down to his navel
who laughs like a saint when he plays the company Santa
every Christmas
Men
greater than any characters in any Dostoevsky novel
in little hells of factories
surrounded by gravel yards
Men
I can never forget
burned into me like a blast furnace flame.