Sights I’ve seen make heroes incontinent
When jungleshift occurs, will you still be so confident?
When the very trees you marked with X’s are gone, sent
By vengeful nature to weave and lead your missteps
Will you call yourself the apex when you see the henges
Raised up here, where ditches to stygian ends blend with ferns, hiding edges
With pulleys and sledges megaliths dragged here, dredged with much drudgery to the summit
See the hillside dolmens, blent with great sympathy where they stand
Land, stone and sky, here where it seems a man never walked, the indelible impression of his Durer’s hand
See the ancient henges, raised to elements and gods of vengeance
Raised by ancient man, once with king’s blood drenched
Tall as a Giantess, capstones form the wedge some two hundred stone weight.
Ten men line the banks
Tent poles in kitbags
Sons of sons of bankers
Behemoth tankers
Of Banquo aspect
A more traitorous flank
One would not turn one’s back to
Tension in the ranks
Glass tanks full of specimens for the advancement
Of learning at the Royal Academies in London and Antwerp
Discovered a new species of ant seen to work
Symbiotically with a certain kind of bird
The bird leaves one third of its kill, in return the bird sits atop the anthill
And is thrilled by ant phalanxes rilling across its plumage, rummaging
For crumbs, unpicking knots, thundering toward a wing
To pick it clean.
A professor takes clean water from a spring and makes tea
He makes peace in this chaotic place, consults his I-Ching
He asks of it advice, on each thing
Which blocks his clear thinking
He considers the outcomes fixed, after all casinos exist
We’re born somewhere betwixt chip pile and flush in fist
He spreads tarot cards cruciform, turns the first over and fears its warning
His warding pendants and string-hung charms sway as if in alarm, a harmless
Zephyr lifts his tent flaps like a slapper’s skirts
But in a magical mindset he fears the arrival of some unseen curse
He fears the water, where an Undine worse than any undying nurses
Grudges so old they’re rusted, or that some blighter from Tartarus
Had his Thanatos intended, he is a Taurus and a tourist in this land yet
When his hand looms like a flesh-clothed sun over his African map, it feels somehow correct
Directly he turns over the second, a section of ramped tablecloth grants the image living aspect
It is a Rider Waite deck flecked with bold purple and yellow tones. His index finger pecks
At the third before furling the corner and turning it over
When your morion helmet rusts with sweat and feels like an oversized bucket on your head
Will you still long to be the conqueror?
Mount Abora thrums with dulcimers, sweet scent wound to sound for Orpheus to soothe a hound
Whereas Orpheus went underground, we cross Hades overland
We are ground down to our constituent parts like alchemical ingredients
Or the overworked nibs of greedy geniuses taking down taxonomies and genuses
Vital roots like genetic swirls of which they are ignorant, pearl-clutching what’s the Bible
Say.
Until now it felt life was a trenta at a starting length, a test to strengthen patience
Now each and every moment illuminates another golden page in the book of days
Whosoever is without the book of life sinks to the sulphur lake and drinks from the endless pyre
To be harangued by vampire bats, bitten until fevered, in a chthonic Escher empire
Tentacled sun like a monstrance, all the glitter of Monserrat’s
Marian miracles come in blinding beneficence. Serrated
Sawlight from the hyper fires, the mellifluous mimicry of the jungle choir.
The planets orbs on an abacus, the eldritch calculus tallies the balance with vile fingers
Our aquabus takes slender corners, sounds what looks unnavigable
When stationary one skittish crewman takes up arms, trains his arquebus toward the palms
His mind one with his walnut stock carbine, he abuses readiness
Doubtless he would fire even if one showed friendliness
Out here away from order, a disordered mind can pass unnoticed for a great span of time
A man left to his own devices can dig a deep mine inside himself and never climb out
His deluded mind can send him signs, missives professed divine, names of those who must die
Or that the thinker has died but their manner of passing denied passage to heaven, some bind
Must be uncovered, something taken given back in kind
His spine is architect straight, his clammy palms snugly fixed around the blam trigger
At any sign of a man, he would tense his hand and let his lead expand
The dimensions of any limb where it should land
Beyond the palms, rocky outcrops, and further beyond
Rugged pines like chained slaves are connected by vines, great shaggy stalactites as bind Fenrir until ragnarok
Harquebusier short only destrier and direct orders.
When familiar faces are learnt
To be masks
Horrorseer like Colonel Kurtz
Always best to presume the worst
Conrad aboard a steamer his story heard
A man with a black beard who took a philtre of kir in his jet-dark beer
Detailed gory deaths traded for glory in the arboreal
Hell of the dark continent
Before the lark rises let me handle thirst
Before wine disguises me let me business first
I’ve seen larks rising to candleford
Ralph Vaughan Williams played on an old gramophone
The scratchy record rotated, the music elevated the room thought he sat alone
Lonely lonely lonely throne
Table mandelbrot set for two for tea
Fourteen courses to gorge on, gorgeous
Grouse cuts, all manner of gizzards and guts to delight Lestyrgonians
Drawing room window a tad open looks out upon the lawn, where light strikes his begonias
Table set for her but she’s been gone years, her favourite petunias curled up like fears.
Deep in the interior
Here man is inferior
They stick to muddy lanes, their tugboat The Somberlain
Even their guides will not ambulate in certain places
Taboos about graveyards and how they are maintained
Yet when we pass them we see they contain
No headstones to mark the graves
Bones in full view, some ragged in old gore
Sporting short stories about how death was obtained
Only priests through long study attain the requisite skills
To visit the graveyard and return without being killed
The great orb, shadowlender, night’s blender
Teases orpiment veins from the vain, waxy faces of leaves
We wished to journey downriver, sin abating with each surpassed delimit
The napping first mate was bitten atop his pate and met a cruel fate
Lancinating pains shot through him, his hands unable to sate
Unable to create conditions where he could ask for assistance
His life in remission proved a threat to our mission
Splendour of dawndusk
Sutures mending midnight’s meteor-carved trunk
Light in ossuary eggshell spotlights extends like a stretching arm from alarming clouds
Everything here is armed, designed for harm
Animals have armour, plants spiny armaments designed to induce trauma
A sword-leafed plant like a pentacle built of schiavona
A two-tined smilodon a toothy smile and shark guile is seen for a while
Tendering night’s surrender
Tender as the struck cheek of an eager apprentice
Trees shapeless in the panic-inducing darkness like apparitions
Awaiting conditions for their appearance
A moon-leant grace on a star-etched face, deep into the basin looking out
Sol races, burns bright and fears not self-consumption, there is no running out
But Luna is a slow sadist, every sluggish second wrung out for juices
Tuna-deep the bodies they consign to the lake, its mirror face breaking
Caking themselves in soot, pallbearers fear the dead will waken
Having ashed their whiteness, all precautions are taken
One can hear the world breathless as its ceaseless rotation
Our captain must have the most boring voice afloat
His throat’s action is like a sleeping agent, he speaks sedation
Water loud with predation
By the messy shore where saurians splash in hunt or wallow
Trees predating them and us and even the water radiate outwards like
Noxious ash
Tucked at short collars, apotropaic wards built to war with potential misluck melt into shiny, bubbling pools on the floor
Holding the steering wheel our pilot intones
For us to look where a three toed sloth makes his way home
Titus Groan
Seven-toned songs throng the throats of Lydian birds
Jungle ties itself in impassable knots, Gordian trees
Piles of stacked stones thousands of years also, as if a Gorgon at shouting freeze
Spied movement.
Alchemisland 
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