Alchemisland

Sky leaks like a stabbed IV

Saw the very last English rose turn to dust

Someone tell Pete Doherty to write a song for me 

We never look back into the sun

Since giant rocks smashed the sky

It has shone brighter a hundredfold 

It bakes the young to look old, drys the eye

We have learned to fear the sunshine 

Balor’s lidless eye its scouring beams baneful

Charred flesh painful 

Former beauty queen now coughs up green and bits of teeth, shameful

Burns across her prize winner

She won them all

Disdainful of reminders, her pictures, 

The ones that aren’t burnt, turned to face the wall 

Anything recalling the burnt world induced appalling floods of tears, a wailing wall 

Her home a former PE Hall 

Her fittings and fixes held in thrall 

By duct tape in balls 

She runs curtains and a washing line from the basketball hoops

Her shelves lined with salves, gels, slathery vaseline type things, KY jelly 

All from a looted Boots whose smoking rubble she’d sifted through 

She had camped on the green nearest the Boots

In the night heard boots abusing cobblestones, someone getting orders down the phone 

She is prone watching them go down Dawson Street towards the old Waterstones 

From which she rescued a Penguin Classics Wind in the Willows 

She always loved Wind in the Willows 

In the end it was When The Wind Blows

The rubble was still glowing then 

Nothing would stop her going there

She waited three hours, felt like infinity

They crossed the road to the ruined Tower 

Records, fecked around then went to Trinity

She used to know a guy who worked there 

Raised in Ringaskiddy, studied fiscal something, his name was Fiacra Finnerty 

Always said his name sounded like a political dynasty 

Town is pitch dark, no more lamps on 

Prone so long her legs cramp but she presses on 

Might be her swansong but she’s desperate for tampons 

That was then and this is now 

Her larder is well stocked, make a prepper proud 

Everything from headache medicine to Barrington Levi CDs pinched from HMV 

BBC news on a jerryrigged hifi courtesy 

Of CURRYS Carrickmines, had a mind 

To hike back out there sometime 

It proved a goldmine 

Tins of rice, bottles of wine 

Miraculously untouched by the rampant crime 

Rust beneath ample climbery 

The violent forms of blasted trees mimic ivory, shaved tightly

Paper birch coloured lightning from a whip-cloven sky  

Trineing in dread peals 

Like an appeal from Zeus, his ear appears 

As forktricity shears back the eve 

The packet does not ensure excellence 

But it ensures esculence 

That must be sufficient 

Mince for dinner tonight, thrice 

This week and last, a sprig bedights 

She thinks of knights

In plate when using her mirrored pots 

Her plate she fills, eats and will not stop 

Until there’s not a jot left to drop for the ants

Never a good sign when ants won’t eat the dinner she’s already eaten

Checks her stocks, plenty of sheets 

In case she shits, replace her fluid with electrolytes 

She hangs onto life and still finds idle 

Moments to delight in  

Sin claimed that world but this is another 

A fire which no belljar can smother 

Burns in every one of us 

So that two alone could bring us back 

We will never be taken off the map 

Potholes bubbling like foundry vats, toxic rain makes an acid bath 

Rabid bats large as Gath’s tallest resident

Exclaim goddamn at passing bat shape, thought it was Gotham 

Everything gothic, nothing with windows or doors anymore

It must have been a bank vault 

Several floors below exalted 

Like a saint at the second coming 

Up toward heaven 

When the midnight clock left eleven 

The host leavened in the centre of the monstrance, prayer in every holy monastery against this monstrous 

Collecting of accrued debts 

The holy find crude deaths 

In the new wild wild west 

They uncase the holy staff 

It is blown to chips by the ire of Ra

The Pope on his knees at Montserrat, a humble stance, on his hands he begs the queen to stay her hand 

An explosion shored through blast proof doors, a bore

Bandits fearful thick Captain Nemo beards

Steamroll us in regular offensives 

They cut our fences.

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So these are the wages of our younger days

These we master now are but slaves to 

Sordid well misspent yesterdays 

Spent in an ale haze

The end of the age of eminent men 

No more a rutting stag emblem to a strifeful epoch 

It is the age of Aoife, the age of the female 

Osiris is aged, his son Horus too full of rage 

Our saviour is graceful Isis, sage of sand, her wedding band is not her claim

She shakes the frame 

Of the insane world and the inscribed words slide off the page 

Having a place her own, somewhere like home, lends her needed privacy 

Four walls and duvets hung as privacy screens

Between what she calls rooms, repositories of things she had seen 

When the world was clean 

She used to live near a stream golden 

When it wore the solar broach

After the blasts the smell would choke

Putrid aromas arose, flesh-full roaches

Scurried at her approach

Dead fish and men, alike gutted, choked it

She chokes back tears and hangs her yellow wax mac 

Mithril strips span the sleeves like glinting tramtracks, threads 

Like crossed fingers where seams split, a task she dreads 

She sits in her chair and uses a Pull&Bear hairbrush to comb out her dreads

She pops out a blisterpack then whacks back two antirads 

She’s on the rag, feels bloated and bad

Mad at the world for turning

Her breasts are tender and sore

She takes two painkillers from the bottom drawer, last of that store

Knocks them back with a swish of water

Roving gangs of rape-mad barbarians 

Like an armed legion of rabid barbarys

Living in the margins, marches and marshes 

A wandering marchand called Ciaran waved his wand and got his hands on a Panasonic 

She has batteries of all kinds and a generator the size 

Of two R2D2s. She kicks off her shoes, her heels blistered and bruised carve a groove on the foot poof 

Feet up on a stool mood 

Just because the world ended, don’t stop making time for you 

Know the genny is running because the hum fills the room 

A familiar thrum, the world-hinting static of the womb

She puts on a film, curls up and sucks her thumb with a red throw on her lap

She avoids films with a lot of violence 

Used to be gorehound, loved to watch it fountain 

Said Terrifier 2 was mild

Something for adults and not for a child

She browses the titles in her modest library 

Nothing evil and nothing Bible-y

She has Crank 2 High Voltage 

A Walk in the Woods with Nick Nolte

Hunchback of Notre Dame 

Dambusters and Major Payne

Max Payne, Black Rain, Jumanji

Kwaidan, Lake Placid, Valley of Gwanji 

Several Tom Hanks, several Anthony 

Hopkins including Fastest Indian and Hannibal 

Duncan Jones Moon and Mute 

National Lampoon’s Animal House 

Final Fantasy Advent Children 

Children of Men and Bad Religion 

Live in Sacramento, Santa Sangre 

Bad Santa, I Spit on your Grave 

The Sum of All Fears, Behind Enemy Lines 

500 Days of Summer, Enemy Mine 

She has time, time enough at last like that Twilight Zone title 

She had lived to see the twilight of all idols 

Having perused all the titles, she found one fit to requirements 

Something appropriately mindless

She will spend the evening enjoying the timeless vehicle for Rupert Grint’s ass

Comedy classic Thunderpants, grinned throughout

A happy lass

It looks like someone went at her face full blast with a cutlass 

She did not die, she will live to spite 

The fact the world has gone to shite

Her face or what passes 

For one

Looks like one of those cut asses 

In the snow in the film Alive

How glum

She used to chew gum and lead cheers 

She was Dairy Queen three years 

Running back in London

Her neglected skills returned slowly

She went from prey to predatory 

She would not be a footnote in someone else’s story 

She still won’t allow a mirror

Even if she’s used to gory sights now

Prayer the best form of bribery

Begs she won’t break out in hives

Too humble or broken to ask to thrive.