Alchemisland

His fast-beating heart so often in his mouth

Slows like lust at hundred’s half

He bleeds like a stuck calf

Soon his white shirt is plastered 

To him pink and diaphanous 

Like old revenge cast in alabaster

His eyes wells, the spells he won’t cast

The worlds he will never master 

Forbidden from this ever after

Hands plug my mouth 

Pink raspberries sud his lips

He grips the killing wrist as it outrips 

His sands run out

His cupped hand attempts to catch it

Blood gloved he paws the wound, drags a patch 

Of rag where the lagging skin flap hangs 

Like a bedraggled flag, or a haggard hag 

His attacker who struck in want, not in anger

Has gone deathly pale, white as scribe’s nuzzler Pangur

He does not hang around waiting for be hanged, or harangued by a gang of city guards

Thanks his lucky stars, makes his start

The whole world is falling apart 

A nearby card player attends my fallen friend

He cannot pen together his flensed sections, he is an unfinished dissection

To stitch back together would not mend him

Not even the dark magic of old Memphis could cure him

His flank is tender, he winces at touch, the stranger tends him, lends him a hand 

He leans in, bends his ear to ensure he understands

Two stop to stand and suddenly it’s a crowd, he scrams them, shoos them wavinghand

Give space to this man 

Give grace to this man 

Two sand grains remain

The crowd delay their exit but give ample space

They see in his face an echo of that place

They will go to, we age into disgrace 

As we age out of this place 

We are displaced, cut off from the human race

His blood races out, the bloodsoaked trousers are rigid, crimson and brown

In his sacks of air he begins to drown

Mayan sunface looks down

Everything gold, everyone crowned

Two sand cranes on the strand 

Tattoo bird runes on wet sand

A body floats by, bobs a while

Tides take out the drowned who died

The Cranes do not wonder who died

At this here shore a short time only

Sure hearing, spear fishing, gliding glory 

They can soar but down here they see more 

Or the more they see they see more closely, adore 

More ferociously 

The body drifting far from view

A feeling that they somehow knew

Him, can’t shake it 

Great games afoot in the skies 

Hidden Sol dome nachtifies 

Reality defying raptures captured in the mute astronomer’s files

The moon’s eyes shall never spy high day

But something in that view elides 

Articulation, a broken armature.