He looks at me for the first time without armour
I plug his waterfalling wounds, as it were my dharma
Hand grips my forearm hard and plain alarm
Etched across his paling countenance, harm
Done to one is done to all, done to self, a charm
Bracelet of jangling apotropaics
You won’t ever have that little farm we talked about, a little one on your arm
Another on your knee, a cow in the barn and a horse for each
A mess of fluids no one’ll own up to, sanguinary swap meet
His lips red as fantasy, through pooling blood one barely gleans a glance of his talking muscle and gleaming teeth
Tis facts read as fantasy
His ichor runs in frightening rivulets through the vertically striated concrete streets
Your red essence, essential without which dead, before my eyes the last of senses
The last moments a census would count you, the last moment you could stand to be counted
Your rapid senescence spells an end to the vast multiplicity and replenishment of the present
One moment you seemed rapt by dreams, eyes agleam with keen girls and green fields
The next your haunted eyes imply that some dread terror is arrived, whom none survive
Mounted as it were by the impish nightmare
How it must feel, the reel coming at last to an end
Despising your end, smiling despite it
Through cloudbores, His spies relay positive reports
Whosoever called his mother whore, whosoever slighted She he adored, will hear no retort
He will sleep forever in that undiscovered country, while I toss like a whale-revenged schooner and sleep no more
In retrospect his life’s size seems minute
In fact, nothing of it was life-sized
He lived a diminutive life, with no more guile than the next guy
Frugal and sober, his Father Feargal and mother Sonya when they left him with me
Promised he would grow on me
Now the manse of me, the door out which I speak, my windows my eyes that see, climbed by his ivy
His death ires me, those fires deride our planned fates, such cruel japes belie
A crueller world, empty of all meaning, shaped to our thoughts thereof
Fluxsome entire, this pie without content boasts every filling between Eden and Nod
Satisfying none and all, the appalling misery of it all, the arch competence
Of its wandwaver, his verbs decline in every tense for he masters and eludes time
The world’s invisible rhythms
Relation of this to that, that to this
Concomitant the lip and the fist, the bruise and the kiss
Life and death indivisible
For him the invisible world is made visible, his head swerves like a dirigible
To peruse perfection’s gallery, that sublime original
Nothing here save furtive shadows
Ginger stepping fate’s cruel arrows
I am before the cogitator
Pearl of pearls, his dignities fruit sefirot
They never rot, and all he says is wrought
He came once in fire and tempest, a jove dually wroth
He rode the world then, stallion of his lands with legs astride
Hot still from the egg, the cooling world formed into stacks
The settling land impressionable as hot wax on an adrogyne’s back in the windowless city
Where lives the lictor of Thrax, his mantle spun of blackest black, acephale sword on his back
Its hilt and pommel like a penitent’s rood, lacking only the racked and riven Christ, in his mercy
He comes again concealed
Twice bitten, he flinches the steel
He recalls those nails between his veins
He recalls his back skin hanging in elephant ear flaps and unimaginable pain
He remembers his punctured side and vinegar’s bitter taste.
A map is shown to him, a map of his making, of his father’s making
Marking out thin places, on this he formulates the final ambuscade
He explains his plans to the chagrin of his men, every man among them his own tirade
First dismayed entire at prior consultation’s lack, next waylaid by the notion of full scale attack
You will not beat satan sitting back
Here, bemoaning what you lack
The tracks are many though they appear few
See, his fingershadows grille map contours, he traces the back of the mountains
Those in view though riled are by his gentle force compelled, brought even to smile
He is due all deference
He highlights areas where defences
Are sore lacking, we could attack here?
He places a tack in the likely place of attack
A long track from the cities up to the hills, O’Sullivan’s march
His hands retract, remain wrapped at his scoured back’s back
Readings of celestial charts, Chaldean arts plied to predict the darting
Of stars and solar maskings, the sun of asking, the son of the world asking
His generals to ride out with banners unfurled, to retake the world, blasting
Forth from the church of our long stasis, with all the arms at our beckoning, stations
We stop at to graze will be the cindered sites of cities we raged toward and razed
Let havoc’s hounds’ frothing mouths tear their autarch down, smoke seen for miles round
Let every flesh clothed form be stripped to its raw chassis, fit for charnel
Let us make like cruelly wise Nessus and clothe the world in poisoned garments
Contrary reputation for mirth and misdemeanour, murder and medicine, praying hands and armaments
Each man thirty times Constantine leans on his generals to ensure no rapine
Occurs on their violent tour, they will kill and gladly war, babes will be fed to hungry speartips
But they will obey these penal codes as under oath, on pain of sliced throat
The way then is clear, we meet here at Dawn and go where the Spear
Of Destiny steers away; a great cheer at that, the final day draws near.
Babel’s linguists visit upon him visions, he cries the bitter lake
Writhing, scabrous forms walked the world in bygone days
Bones as mark attempted genocide piled outside the cave where it hides
Darkness in darkness time biding, tides taking, ides ticking off on the wall.
They arrived
A great low swelling, as of numberless wasps
Horns rise, a ditty for the dawn of a pitiless day
On one side of the Piteous Gate his swelling ranks abeyant await marching orders
They play at dice, they fight
God has called a misericord, they are permitted vices
If this be thy last night, you things everlasting, die not without an applebite
An army equalequipped stood gleaming in defence of their city
Couple-coloured banners windbattered flapped on diamond poles
Pretty things, destroying them a pity
Gone now are the days of strongly worded letters
Witty retorts and pithy asides, cat scratch catechism and free verse gospel
Corinthians as written by Jack Kerouac, leaning against the hood of his red cadillac
Or in quiet hostels the wrong side of Mexico, cuidad de la manzana oro
Golden rose of the world in scintillating robes has risen again as an overthrower
Only half his force in view and the groundtroops shudder at his power
Blooming of the worst flower, wash away the Martello tower and the fellow inside who dreams of tigers
Undressing petals, corrosive pollen chews metals like dogs do dental sticks
A shamir of the flesh made at midnights on the days of creation
Forged beside Urim and Thummim
The entire world in shade at the vast frond bottom of his thumb
They do not take prisoners, none are sent to Frongach to perfect IRA bombing gach lá
Tiocfaidh ár lá
His lámh draws back the curtains
Free of all laws
His spread fingers span the sun
He clasps it once, the light is gone
No more dappled dawns to draw, nor jesuits to fawn o’er birdcaw
He claps but once, the battle is on.
Aeons since he stirred from his throne
The Living God has been rendered bone
Others attest that we are entirely alone
That mental illness is the home
Of religion, fit only for dunce cone
Wearers, or grief-mad recent pallbearers
He will stir no more than the stone
He can go no further than a fish on a hook
As if in answer, a cornea-branding light shone from above
And the ground trembled terribly, shook
Like a seizing Emperor, in truck with the tall towers the mountains fell
Noah never sees the dove, left this world the last of love
Love’s last dregs, litany of lost labours the flattened cities
Ankles and knees testament to vast statues
Rubble from their blasted alabaster cobblestones the avenues
Snaking through the smoking revenues of our reviewed conduct
Muse shorn of hair in tattered dress address the ashes
The mews where her last favourite lived
All amusement is gone from the world
No more it is the world where ye lived
Ye are moved, nay removed, like Anna Livia
The Liffey is just another underground river
Now; long-coveted dream of Brigadier General Lowe
God said when the world ended, he would spare Ireland
That sparse land so thronged with religious scholars
Ascetic landmass, mystical landscape, few too many collars
Got the priests too hot and bothered, had they bothered to investigate onanism
Or truly seen their countrymen as brothers, they would not have raped each other
A line across the northern climes, a line which marks the battle lines
He sinks Ireland like the rest, rotten we are, sink like a crime’s
Receipt down to the chests of long-dead pirates, which crabs climb.
To cleanse all the races
And the monoliths bearing their faces
Images of beforelord mighty hunters
Powerful warlords who walked among us
In antient time, of old those renowned
Who were by salt drowned
He reckons now a cleansing by fire
A conspiracy against His nations
A reckoning at Tyre, wrecked entire
Her pride, prizes, profits, the prophets said
Would be sacred to the Lord as a matter of course
His rule so lightly enforced gives to a single world-ending evening of misrule
Not since Eve and Eden was such wrath seen, scenes not seen though nothing new under the sun
Had been this side of the world’s younger seasons, when the curse of reason
Did not defile us, neither murder nor treason nor violence stole our pride, our arts appeased him.
Something like a slime
Strange resin thought to be the sky’s sap
Drips down in thick, wobbling droplets
Lowering down into laps
Like slow graces; they do not fall as raindrops but as leaves
Side to side and slow as through the mire
Wading, the entire land is in like style
Alike slimed
Our God is a sitting God, they said
Yet he stood
They slew with rapidity
Corpses swell, abundant morbidity
Abilities beyond this world’s reckoning unveiled
Testament to might, light as from vast rail guns
In one focused beam along the spine of night
Pink as venus
Such sights are not seen twice
Nothing he says is trite, his every syllable a new height
In mastery, he is the heightened, the most high
What he hights so is it named, he knows when we will die.
Alchemisland 
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