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

A copse of vegetation, a firmly pressed angle of turf surrounding
the appearance of the atrophied cocoon, a broad earthly plunger
of ecstatic quest. This mass of unteased tiny rods grows like an
old worn-down scrub brush, devoid of lotion and pomade, where not
even a weed sprouts, let alone a twist of green grassy blades,
for if the skin were furrowed like a bed for wheat, nought would
come of it but pain and scab, a bitter harvest.

Marshals of the twin rocks which hang loosely wrapped in limbo,
like two drops of fresh born chicken, its complete evolvement
arrested by unknown indeterminate factors, who knows what fate or
fortune awaits man should the prickly pears drop from under, and
from them burst the seedlings of long since evolved human mutants,
with strange psychic powers able to voice logical answers to
problems of which man is baffled, the age of the stars, the
building of the pyramids, and the fate of man.

This mat of itchy pile, coat of tubers, seems caught in a world
of inextricable confusion, its life buried beneath the woven
fibers of darkness, almost as if, to submit them to long periods
of light would cause embarrassing predicaments; could it be that
the follicles would grow like rampant vines and strangle the belly
of its host, an uncontrollable skein, a tightening bond of asphyx-
iation, or is it for fear of some winged insect’s pollination?

Oh skin backed rug of prayer, and panic, oh smudged shadow, an
error hastily and partially erased on the modified blueprints of
man. A stampede, an ocean of muddled dandruff-free aspirations,
like earth’s own wilderness to the touch, stingy when sat upon,
harbouring. a built in weakness for fungal maladies, a scalp of
tumbleweed terrain, a tatty terrycloth often dripping with the
effusive residues of constitutional rust.