Alchemisland

Below deck hidden holds, bars 

Tolls bone-exacted extracted by knee-impacting steps slick with stale sea wetness

Steep stairs scored with splinters, the bold who defy scrapes find themselves escaping danger

Snug as a manger, stunning lack of arrangement, amazement of piles all sizes

All the stock ever seized by pirate or exciseman, sky-high

Witness to wonders, to whit 

Whitenesses of sufficient brightness as cause blindness

Styled gold in likeness of a man, in such quantities as quash kindness

Prosodies of pearl and silver

Tablets Thoth scribed upon in dawn ages

Transcribing alchemes for latter-day sages

His invention the indention of holy wars which see all lands indentured in Egyptian servitude

Pharaoh as demiruge

Onyx tablet on which are described in styled gold sylvan scenes of honourable hunt

In the month of September, when Demeter’s scimitar blows lower cornstalks

Moon argent, Mars-scarlet lips blood rips from teeth ripping 

Above three stars Mary Arden’s son might charge with fate; Birnam Wood is come to Dunsinane

Out front ardent hounds with locking jaws bounding after pursuit-familiar foxes 

Vases from Asia, faces of ancient drakes seduced from jade blocks

On cracked Papyrus, odes to Osiris found in caves near the Nile

Spider lines in mystical alliance finance unlikely outcomes

Tomes from frond-barriered lilial valleys, boreal frenzies lending airs of fantasies

Fingers mimicking orpheus breast strings, prancing along luthier-made veils

Trained to effortlessness, plucks effervesence teeming mellifluousness 

Essential swelling impresses on breasts in orchestral dreams moment’s intensity, teeming meaning symbols keys

Plectrums strumming temper-dumbing dulcimers

Careful as beaks preening kingly birds

Melodies as madden paradise’s avines, which rouse rapine in sagacious satyrs whom only rape’s taste sates

Fanning birdtails, dangerous stymphalian like impaling sussurations, alien planet plants

Like streaming diamonds climbing fairy tale bean-begot vines to a giant’s kingdom

Colours striated stacked, placement order of amazement, maze of breath-taking paintings which arrest a gaze for a moment that lasts an age, greyed at what felt only a page’s turning

The world never stops turning, each burning dawn rising like a peach apocalypse

Every mote of pale-turning learning paid for in journeying closer the closing throat

Joseph’s dazzling coat an indigent’s rag next heaven’s mithril-riven flags, which surpassing masons whose demise made angels long laboured at

We are never more discerning, more mature, than on the eve of our deaths.