Alchemisland

Next to the tourney

Divers stalls: apothecaries, dentalists, coopers, alloymongers, errant blades, brewers, bards, flights of disfavoured heraldry in pitiful absolution, wanton and pius forms of man, woman and beast coagulating cohabitating in drink and filth

Cogitators stay home, revels ten nights will be and sleepless

In thresholds willing names would drip from contracts, hugging beams hoping to stall

Stalls loud with destriers, bred to rush cannon and mow down men; Diomedan herd.

Every nervous twitch tintinnabulating inside armour, stilled with mead

Next to the tourney

Stalls and paddocks to ride and train and tourney

Arrows strike hard, loosing gore of stalks from burlap hauberk

Such quantities that Elysium must be bald

Jousters scry lanes for advantage, horses anxiously bray

Hard by here a melee

A knight his page his blades and wiles are

Next to the tourney

Page turned, his master’s voice

A mount for one knight, afeared of cast shadows

Sounds of old rout rouse gauntlet to tremble

Spoon player din of rattling old knights, late to Valhalla

His sagging face adopts the spit clear plate, sad hall of mirrors

His breastplate buckles cut into his hip which edge lends

Denting mace meting out rearrangements

Might reducing bucklers to splinters

Grinding brute force pestle fusion of iron and flesh

From his bared gorget cascaded

Lunula of blood, steaming

Spaulder loose, dangling from useless limb

Beyond ruination, innards by lancet exposed twisted as a written word

Malodorous aroma prompts fixation of posies

‘Chief ‘scured chins, like a stall of Saracens

In thrall of Termagant

Fouled strides of the felled men, some primitive glory to the victor