Alchemisland

Sound of quarantine siren’s cock-drowning reveilles

Diseases dalliance, man’s disaster

When chimaeras alliance, the end faster

Than their sapping tango

Dislike fruit but they wish would man go

The end first which beginnings after

The tickling cough that signals slaughter

We’re far from needing dead daughters to get reasonable flights

Although we recommend a vial or two before sailing for a fight

We also recommend one Mr Achilles, protect his heel from arrowflight

This therefore his fate, his only weakness however slight

These days you can go online, spend two minutes and book a trip for five

A family of five are dead inside there, can you believe that

You wouldn’t know to look at it, you wouldn’t know if you did look

Six locks and tape enough to rewind Osiris, the family were all Irish

But recently had returned from a trip out foreign

They’d notions, longings god knows where they’d been or what’d brought back in

The Father had the broad back he was a rod’s darling, that broke early like a dropped jug

His daughter the maximum potential age of a Starling, knew no cannibals, swelled up like a cannonball or a waspstung pug

They were sick when they arrived, driving through town like something from Hills Have Eyes

Their car wound up the incline toward their hilltop manse, silhouetted like the lab from Frankenstein

The bruising wine of evening spilled out kingly purple, the twisted nipple battering black all light chased from the firmament, it came time

To act

Townspeople remembered covid, cholera too recalled 

Another flux they wouldn’t condone, so they wore evening as a shawl

Stars shone through midnight’s awl-torn apron 

We bricked up the doors and windows, made their sitting room a tomb

Like Bathory blood bather before them, anchoress entombed

Home that loving bosom a wounding womb, mold-hung tomb

A punishment room, time enough to consider why they’re being pruned

Not a snack of light penetrates

They are like dismal sacks, sagging and slack, yet about them a total lack of death

There is no resignation in their posture, they hold one another, their lips frozen in breath

The slight pout and protruding tongue tip ready to nudge the last word at

Unnerving stasis, as in a long lost spaceship whose eyeless captain says it’s hell

Black sludge has leaked from their trouser ends and hardened to a resinlike slag

They sat on the couch prepared for a flu, a few days off, box set or two

A handkerchief for each of them, at their feet a tissue bag, in hand a lemsip mug

One imagined if one checked the fridge, they would find flat 7UP

They had no clue what their bodies harboured, a vileness from out the East

Seedling of a future lockdown, the brimscent of the coming beast

On the walls the averted eye icons the icons

We did this to them the zyklons the zyklons

We are tightly knit our bunch, typically full of feeling

But with germers I’m a psycho Cylon to whom life is for the stealing

Today, they’ll pry off the boards we all flock there like tourists

Even the poorest partake this bread and circus 

The first is carried out by his armpits and feet, his face a plain of cysts

One crotch-crossed hand falls and begins trailing, the lifeless fist sheds its rings like a hit Sonic

Draupnir for a moment, they almost drop him but don’t on the way down to the riverbank

Next the kids are carried out covered, expressions of yesterday’s chronic agony 

I met next the men who wasn’t there, his wife and kids, Antigone

Deified for a day, the divine are denied life, deicide on the altar

The manner of death decided at birth, codified in brindled oak bark

Die drowning in clouded bog water, loam for butter

Last utterance a cry, much like the first

You will neither thirst nor tryst nor twirl at tourneys

You will sink, languish and undertake no journeys.