Alchemisland

Phantom halo of slipped gallow’s rope

Pink girdle around the neck

Merriment and mirthful mouthings

Drams of Scottish whisky 

The frame’s shadow like a crooked back

Unfouring his legs’ atrophied muscles

Removes his gold corona, tosses it away

Three fingers caress empty eye socket

Circumference of aperture a cave mouth

Cave where fire is born

Azure his unsettled doublet

Venetian red his closed-cuff braies.

Astral financial projections for the year ahead:

More golden rains than an Oktoberfest piss trench,

And glory like unto a God.

20 across Norway 23

Rancid smell of rotting fish

Mounding on the silty bank

Bone-skewered flanks odorous

Gull pecked and eyeless gawping

20 aboard the cocaine mothership.

Only in depressing sedation

Order sufficient to compose

Inchoate fragments of fetal verse

Beyond formlessness but unripe

Protozoans, their decagonal branchings weep for pruning

Mind like an ocean full of sharks

Chinless shark mouths like lyre bows

Guileless, danger borne of ignorance

When rude trees first broke the rainless desert of virgin earth

Sharks were old

When arose fell kingdoms whose denizen monstrosities did Cain’s work aeons before his birth.

Sharks were ancient among their ocean kin;

In onyx Babylon when unmixed wine bubbled in a Godking’s guts 

Sharks were antique masters of their domain, brine princes

No match I for them.