Alchemisland

Lurid commandments, Fortinbras reactions

Fortifying sandbanks to stop seas, plasters for gangrene

They are on parade in full array in show of martial force

Know now what Mam meant but too late to mention it

She’s weeks dead and buried, across firerivers ferried to unmerry walled places – not Derry

Street’s last house 

House number bent

Number hundred three now number ten

Glad of meagre tenement where ten a bed rest tender radsick heads, others sleep in tents

Picking mold from bread, brewing turpentine wine in old coalsheds

Diminutive crucifixes slapped together from skirting boards mark deathbeds of the exhorded

The noble, lucky dead below feeding seed beds with acrid sour ichors, which leak out

Resulting in prize-winning leeks, would pride had pride survived the nuclear climes

Such times one wishes, one prays, ne’er to see

Ages of squalor and disease, aeons without ease

Strains and confinations, stellar conflagrations without cease

Comets reduce holy nations to condemners kingdoms

Fulfilled aspirations of the devil’s children

The sickened denizens of shelled cities do not want for pity, nor pithy slogans

Babes cry out for bitty, her tit like a crones

Twenty looks fifty, lets him latch to suck out ash

Last of hair, arid tentacles as of a squid born to a desert, slicked back obviously across an ailing head

Lambent light of shortlasting candles after planned blackouts

Sacral, sacred lamb stretched out, neck bent back for knife bloodouts.