Alchemisland

Looking out from the highest window

Gaunt regiment of flayed trees girdling her lonely tower

Purging stones, sins that cure, lonely dismal sinecure

Sign it all away

Walls her grandfather raised marked the barony

Jericho’s opposite, high walls and many years since sounding trumpets

Amidst the crowd yet apart from the whole, she haunts the great house’s narthex

Realities increasing indiscernibility from dreams, memories retroactively recalled as prophetic omens

Her manse received Bacchia, recalling one that she did not participate in

Circumscribed by injury, a brace retained limbic rigidity

Vampires odd from gimlets left the carousel of the ballroom’s midway, catching their breath by her fastness

Ice light drooling from precious fixtures 

Light from bulbs forming messy fulvous suns across lacquered wall panels,

Gem facets return motion millennially

Maenads in Gourdian repose, twisted erotically

Boneless with drink, all yield like flesh wrapped copper wire

Limboeing from laps, presenting raptured rolledback eyes

To the mendicant and her mending arm, liminal at the edge of proceedings

Masked man shooting up in the scarsella where two Turners hang

Turning his pockets out for a lighter, pockets inside out like bleached scrotums

Dilettantes made muses strumpets to the fallingstar rhythms of jazz

Boy, they could make jazz before those nukes fell

Voodoo circulations

Call an exorcist drumming, liquid wristing lewis gun sounds from the snare drum

Subversive rhythms assign alien circumlocutions

Mellifluous motion, tonal taut tight tossing trumpets trumping trilling thrilling 

Loss as loud as a crowded house pervades, seems it sours the grounds

Candlescent last night’s seance, pearlescent phantasms swimming inside the mirror

Reported apportment of a red shade, windlessly winnowing above the round table

Filigree of faraway roads leading where

Her dress and the ruby at her throat a red shade

Difficult to behold

On the balcony

Angel arousing her mouse brown hair tamed in a chignon

Reveals her shoulders

Revels recalling, breath swelling, tales talling in telling

Days when her hair had fallen free, greener leaves adorning trees

Revielles, sweating byzantine reels lent their affair eastern splendour

Dented thumb knuckle, perpendicularly bent to caress the naked ringfinger’s underside

The ring she fumbled with once, haystacks midnight tumbled in, rhapsody of straw and sin

Pale band bends at her finger’s hip, the ghost of her lover

They will never reveil her

Fingers poised like a trained compass

Traces cold marble balustrade marking balcony’s edge

Breathes deeply and, holding three seconds, imbues intention

Exhales stomach flattening, exorcising want

Murmurs indecipherable apotropaic charm

Intriguing herself with velleities, dissipating upon contact with

Notions, I have cried enough at the Cenotaph

Clandestining in postered beds like a succubus

Internal alembics, testicles and trophied tubes

Chemysteries, twenty third of each month crossed

Married men, virgins, shaggers, divorceds

Pecuniary eroticism, clanking coffers her orgasm song

Equation of gold and flesh, Midasian frenzy blotching her china

Prints along the round of her spine and bottom, like a measured horse

Frisson at climax, conducting orgasms the gloved peers 

A chamber behind a bookcase, revealing a string section

Dangling from the ceiling like punitive vines, rough knouts

Like angry balled fists, dull green rope secured like an oath

Sartorial elegance, whorl of manners, glissome pallaver

Words weaved elegantly, their meanings sandwiched between

Patter and prettying and prying and plauding and persuading and persiflage

Perversing over mixed drinks, liquids lying one atop the other

By order of weight, they lay down to bed

Strung up like a marionette, ravished like a Trojan woman

Afterwards stroking his hair in her lap, her joyously split lip protruding like a fish’s

Neither sackless nor condemned, yet some internal misalignment mandated punishment

Capacious desire for caprice

Her passion still as a leveret, cooled by the tower’s distance

Politics of suicidal experimentation, susurrations from the Tarot spread

Whether divine or not

Apathy of the flesh

Equation of divinity and waste

Equation of disgust and delight

Something of the Aztec in it, in her

Puma want, flashes of tooth rent flesh

Sloughing with the incisor’s trawl

A French sensibility, preternatural desire for things raw

All that’s good and all that’s gold, things which she abhors

Boredom which quells even desire to relinquish boredom

Long sigh of life

A palimpsest of meaningless phases, sworn not so

Standing faceless by a mound of cast off masks

Searching for the bleeding one

She had tattooed every inch of herself with another self

Like a snake hoarding shed skin 

Like paint over black mould.