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

The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions/ ghosts of children in gutters and on doorsteps proclaiming by their clay-coloured faces and underfed bodies the post-datement of the millenium/ have freed political prisoners and burned police stations and police papers/ their composite paunchiness, beardedness, scragginess, impressed me unfavourably/ when evening quickens faintly in the street, waking the appetite of life in some/ the back-stairs politician foregathers with the cosmopolitan Financier and the cranky Pacifist! a blotch of pallor stirs beneath the high square picture-dusk, the window of dark sky/ all of us, sitting in darkness, saw a great light. You danced as dance the morning stars/ with a play in verse that no manager would dream of; there were mistakes in grammar, in spelling of course, and worse. There were such phrases as/ put your lamps over my shiners, run your hooks over me Astrakhan collar/ as seen in idiots, cretins, and certain ethnic groups, due to a reversion to the/ sea-voyage tale in which a hero, accompanied by a few companions, wanders from island to island, meets Otherworld wonders everywhere, and finally returns/ thinking of a body X which continues to exist while the movement from A to B is occurring/ when I look at the book I can’t associate myself with the author, I seem to have quite outgrown him. And as I recall the verses I wonder if he really was myself.