Half light half shadow
Half snakes half ladders
William Stukeley, mind you he was a mason
He was amazed
By the henges
The ancients’ ways
Kept him awake
Days he spent on knees digging ditches
Sweating between the cordons
A serpent mound, Atlantean in origin
A porous rock they poured concrete in to stopper a healing spring
That water could heal eczema, bring surcease to vexing itching
Once drew crowds to the centre at Stonehenge.
A central altar stone
Carved with two faces
Severian and Thecla
A wooden structure protects
Projecting up over it a roof downward sloping from a lofty pate, injecting a sense of grandeur
The sinner divested of his sin leaves grinning
The sun drunk, a chalice of babe’s blood
Blood upon the stone, a firstborn son
Pays for the sun’s extortive burning
Blood greases the world’s abortive turning.
We cannot know their ways, the stones tease us
Images and adorations and miracles like those ascribed to Jesus
Depicted in rough friezes, on freezing dales far from the Middle East
Gods of deepwood and leaf, stream dreamers and glade pipers, wise vipers and second-sighted water walkers, powers over fire and ice
Waist-high altars around the gaunt door trilithons raise to the most high, the sky queens, steams and vapours laden with intentions, seen
By charm workers, the manifestors of dreams
Tween light and dark their Gods, attainable and relatable, human-seeing
What changed in the human dreaming
What toxin in the human semen
Precludes us toward ascribing self-defeating meaning
Not a leaf greens without conflict over what it means
That which we see mirrors our mind in the manner of its make-up, so that all matter is merely a matter of mind
We are mad as Hatters, high on the hatglue that the blocked factory flues return in black befuddling clouds that’d make a sulphur demon back out.
Blackout blinds and our minds tantamount, from one design
The prize the wine of life, we have a divine power
To be wholly blind to where we are confined
We can divine what is not there, and from this design
Entirely unsuspected futures, such potentials, such cracks, such slight sutures
Through which a hair of soft wax could not pass unnoticed
Strictures of time, place, structure, mere unguent to a greater will
We are more potent, a perfume pungent, a light more effulgent than any a painter or a philosopher will
Augur, we are tigers who choose to write poetry, we forge futures
From the false pictures our mind gives us, forget Orwellian dystopia
We are in a doped-up Utopia, mere Prokofiev knights dancing nights and time always advancing
Outside these, all else is but a fantasy: a fancy, a pursuit, a funeral.
In the world without, a sense of obvious duality about everything
This reality cause and effect, equal opposites lending definition
Contextual knowledge, enough to make an owl beam, hidden in every crock and crop below every rock and down every steep ledged dell and thorn-hedged edgeland
Yet how much of this proposed dualness is whole duplicity, stemming from the brain’s hemisphericity
The brain stem a bold Homer, a bronze age hangover who thinks the Odyssey isn’t over
We have in our skulls a left side and a right
All that we observe correspondingly alike
We have good to define evil, day to night
Black and white, left and rights
War and peace, water and wine
Love and hate, profane and divine.
The iron tasting child of the chalice is a woozy, love buzz, malice flees it as leeching earls from a palace upon a king’s death
Acolytes act as trip guides for wide-eyed apprentices, nothing in the leatherbound field guide
Nothing in the many miles they spent on their knees in fields picking out mushrooms prepared them for the death of pride
The rubbled ruin of a mask he forgot was a mask falls away from him and he climbs glides skyward like swelling pride like a storm come alive at a witch’s prod
They greet tinkering voidlings, tool-wielding halflings hunched over things, metallic oddments sprouting dreadlock wires, the machine elves’ odd devices
They cower before polearm-jawed mantids living inside the walls of the world
When they wake again in the wood they purge, writhing tossing worm turning neardirt total exertion
Extinction of all inert elements, the serum is a surgeon
William Gull, gulp it down, the old self is murdered
Before you were mordant, morbid, mortal; Mordred
Reborn immortal, a lore fortress thy mind a fastness of facts, thy diary a book of acts, thy tongue the deciding axe, thy balding crown bow often in thanks, thy shanks acclimate to bowing, thy temperament steely but allowing
Henceforth let no crowing cow you, let Odin and Hereward crown you
Let Lugh astound you with his lightworking, his star charts mark the lurking
Influence of murky and mysterious manners of the Ur King
He before Time, who is Time and ends Time.
Witches spin like linnets limning in lunelight at Lammas Night
Limelight pales
Pail content colour, lances of pale purity impale balefully the shaded places
Tallowevening the gathering cloud sieves light from the ceiling
Coupling between the bonny corn rigs
Men in golden wigs splaying their asses, penetrated by women wearing pig masks
Ask to last another year, to see the ash bloom again, to pass the degrees in peace
The priestess greases her phallus, teased from the wood by a lancet
Hardened to perfection by the erotic blacksmith, the silver hand
Of the son-slaying weapon worker wrought in hazel the wood of a man
The would of a man who wills it, there is no why to quiet the how, the now
The beachbound ship prow an extension of the west pointing finger
Heat lingers long into evening, vigour stealing fingers of searing heat makes sticky the backs of faction fighters in fantastic fashions
Flutes and whistles and goat pipes, alive with lovemaking, frisson between the cromlechs
The men here submit to their wives, taken in the shadow of the menhir.
We cannot know what is lost
Only that it is lost
We know only that the ghost
Communicates something by its anguished shrieking.
Sacred words, miraculous herbs, vast earthworks and dazzling diamond hauberks, good works and clean wards for the off worst oft worst treated
The tricks of Druids brought that world to ruin
All knowledge they had sewn into
Breachless wombs, took to tombs
Their strange lunar rites, only the moon
Recalls what wonders their violent workings incited
Stone age Mecca perhaps
Time lapse vision of history as a resurrecting flower
Crowds processing around a wooden temple at the prescribed hour
Feeding off the stone’s undeniable power, to fascinate
To help to endure lancinating pains, life’s vicissitudes
In exchange for the ritual rendering of victuals, the dedication of all victories, the stone could work its graven miracles
Where lightning struck the earth’s rodlike back it burnt black like the fierce flanks of Meraxes having battled with kin flames
Axe to fall, neck of the corn king, rode on a mule from Dál Riada
Crowds of brindled anarchs, hair-woven circlets sparkling in a lark-loud dawn raid
Sunrise paid for in blood
Mud will cup the king
Druids will cut the king
Ample traffic, ground around lith girdling grass trampled in tramping
The champion of that place came forth to a raving crowd, he held his reaving sword and crowed aloud
His words uplifted himself but he was of them and they were proud
The arch druid, a prelate with skin like balled paper and a long tapering beard, grey but red where a dropped paintbrush of his youth still appeared.
Alchemisland 
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