Alchemisland

Red the rod of punishment, testament to our eventual end

Commencing with a rain of descending shells wailing like Djinn

A long reign of hell unto ceaseless bloodshed

Welcoming easeful death

Deck slick with blood

Red as runover berry punnets

Yield of past melees vast upon

Avast ye, cast eyes upon bold bastard William Turner Castle

The church blasted, walks his fo’castle a last time, a wolfish aspect to the captain

Wearing his Persian version caftan decorated like a mosque dome with muqarnas, his tricorn cap halved by a cornflower blue strap, drab among the damned all hands dress like the drowned; their clothes windblown and seableached, rings jewelled with winnings from beachcombing

The sea is another no man’s land, the splayed hand obscures what in retrospect prove dire omens

Godslaying like a Roman, building roads back to Rome in the middle of nowhere, robed in glory on the dolphin-kissed air

But all the while it was there; William’s yeoman showed him a letter from his proposed betters summoning him to Exeter for trial

The famed exiteer entered a dialogue with his exhausted self, he thought of Hell whence crawl his mind’s strifes, he is bound surely for the place infernal and what is a life lived with a name nibbed onto a killing slip.

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His hat dipped down so that only the perimeters of his frown

And the sound of his boots signal his approach, what’s shown

Consider considered, world’s a stage and life’s a show

Willy walks his ship’s breadth at half step, imagining dragging nagging fetters upon his legs which would lag behind his inner urgency

Ledbetters from Tangiers belt out old love letters in the presence of bucaneers, play or get wetter off the plank, privateers preying on prostitutes, the leaf bleach scent of old love, one is getting a wank off the ship’s side by a liquid wristed elider and he grunts delight as he fertilizes the spiked punch bowl of the ocean whose ceaseless commotion for a moment which meaning courted resembled the whore’s wrist motion.

He has been to Tel Aviv, stood on the beach where Telemachus missed his father in his father’s voice, the boy the seed of the man, waiting on Ithacan sand, his mother’s fading wedding band prominent on her hand suits her greatly, suitors note it gravely

He has been to tlemcen, watched telekinetic priests performing miraculous deeds through mind power

He has felt the fog of the Elusinsian cap, he has escaped the dog hour as a man despite Circe’s vengeful power, he has courted the Roman miracle flower and seen rites to Cernunnos in the claret-spattered bower

He has run with cynocephali along the lakeshore at mirrored Nemi, Diana hunting thereby.

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Bound for any wealthy place, he has never run aground, rides the reefs with a medici blade like a vinculum between his teeth

He swung many times below the windlass a gashing cutlass, last thing many a dead man saw, he never once spared a lash

He flashed cash, he dashed from the law, he sawed his prows to spears and bashed through hulls

Now he is brought to heel at last, to be hanged at Hull dock at seven o’clock 

Let this cock crow be his last, the poxy bowsy has cock rot, filled a hundred cots

Spots on his face, dots tattooed all over the place, a graceless portrait of a hasty life

A knife edge tongue runner, a shoot first type of gunner, a tarot mummer too bright

To shine long, unshy crewman throng him one last time long lasting look into Willy’s tiger eye

Sky coloured pupils, his tattoo covered pupils seek some final approval, he is their ruler

He buried his jewels and will never reveal their resting place, in the Celtic way, tears place

Him among the human race though he is at heart a snake sated only by what aches another

A smothering kind of ophidian ape and a raper of innocents, his idea of capers the burning of paper, the defilement of transubstantiated wafers, eye surgery performed drunk with a rapier, holding a babe over a brazier to make a banker recall his paystubs, shooting muskets with laser accuracy crackshot into the enemy nursery.

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Final disembarkation of pirate ship’s prideful pilot

Twilit walk to Tartarus, tired as if tares heavied his eyelids

Gelid fringes of emerald island sent a violent gallows end

Bent head of the condemned, the wages of mayhem

Frightened eyes wide like a henge descried by one in flight, indescribable flights of fancy, fantasy a mancy of one’s inner alchemy, the dreaming elixir induces memory and ecstasy at the point of release

Zenith a thing’s greatest kiting height, byword for hubris

Newton’s rubrics prevent a hiked brick from going higher than skyward

The word was the beginning, both of singing and sinning, such is the conflict of all skinned, finite things 

We are living whims of some greater Insurmountable

A Titan whom none hold accountable

He is the stone, the growing seed, the throne holder

His seat is the mount of kings, bountiful olives burning coloured

His steadfast rock is the thingmount

Such beauteous emotions quell his shaking arms, clacking shackles loud cackling crowd crow criminal hawk to spit, hits his cheek, some miss, matters not for his is the final bliss

The hiss of the crowd equal to the pride of his resistance, his insistence on fixity of stance

He sees the golden monstrance of the sun, golden running down his pants, guttering strides

Butterflies inside butter yellow his last glimpse before his eyes are shied, a burlap tied blinding

Forces back his nose porcine, for the crime he knows is not a crime, not even penal time

Is sufficient, they must end his life and his fruitless line, blind as Zozimus he walks along a straight line

Binds fasten his hands and feet, he inches forward with splayed feet like a penguin

The vengeance of his oppressors is endless, he is friendless in the final hour as all are

Yet he does not feel as a coward feels, dying a thousand times, he is empowered

Proud and coursing with some divine power, he towers over the crowd, allows

Tomatoes to splatter about him, batteries of groceries batter him, they flatter him

Endorse his imminent martyrdom, he knows he is bound for the kingdom, he fingers the ring hump the ruby of his creed and love

The nubs of his nailless fingers, the gaolers brought him to the brink

He never named the members, did not for one second think

To drink the proffered soup, he jumped through no hoops

They brought troopers in, assassins in black and tan sent back from frontline France

They attacked him in his chair, subjected him to exacting and taxing tortures

In a stinking cell below the citadel, the winding stairs like steps to hell, overtures

Of tortured souls scream as the flamelicked spits are turned so the cured are burned further

A skein of Willy’s wife’s bridal gown hedged into his léine hem leant him endurance

The Child of Bethlehem, the Virgin of Lourdes, held his necklace begging relief from duress

Hell or go, head West to the testing sour lands, where the green man’s hands could not make a plant grow.