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

You will no doubt be aware, gentle reader,
of how long the streets of London
have been paved with gold and the road to hell
with the best of intentions.

What may have escaped your attention, however,
is that, in order to give traffic a smoother ride,
the new M6 toll bypass has been lined
with two and a half million Mills and Boon novels,
remaindered and pulped.

Right now business men in Mercedes, suit jackets
slung over leather passenger seats, are gliding
towards top level meetings in Wolverhampton,
still reeking of their secretaries,

square-jawed truckers, biceps bulging
from check shirts, are cursing their tachometers,
urging their juggernauts towards errant wives
and sturdy children, waiting for them
in pebble-dashed semis on the outskirts of Solihull.

Blonde young women with PhDs in astrophysics,
sporting cream slacks, Princess Diana headscarves
and red Porsches, wait by the slip road at junction T5
to pick up third year medical students

and cure their impotence and stuttering
(from which they have all suffered since their abuse
by visiting ‘uncles’ at the age of fourteen)
in two hours of generosity
in a Travel Lodge near Lichfield.

Your humble correspondent can also inform you
that, back here in Liverpool, the entire print-run
of his poetical works:  ‘a mixture of the tough and tender’,
‘a journey that delights, amuses and informs’,
will shortly be cushioning a modest garden path
somewhere in the inner suburbs of that fine city.