Alchemisland

Watching timered grains between columns spiralling 

When the last retires, he life’s timer recycles

Empty egg hosts brood nested awaiting entry by hireling psyche

Some are given souls of beggars, others valorous high kings

But in rendering, at tithe’s taking, at tide’s last licking, at lake lady’s last gladius alofting

All are thin arriving ragged to the liminal threshold, stragglers dragging themselves across dappled canyons like escapeful rats retreating squeaking across a cannoned hold

What flesh imprisons freed, enfolding light greedily drinks down dark 

Death’s cryptic logistics, stressed but smiling

He has a list of those who have died, beguilingly long and daily higher

He works tirelessly from cock to wolf but swelling ink engulfs the page’s empty space

Noting one name, furls his scroll

He dreams not of Eden, but he was there

Emerging first careless Arcadia, slapping the raised ape’s face

Who imaginated himself above mortal fates, must eat, dream, leave this place

Shown his gift’s occulted underside, undesirable element which hostful heaven’s eminence wrought dually in everything

Let crags furrows and flecks crowd thy pleasant face, distending with aging

Tending towards bitter entropy, slow wasting away from birth of all men

Emerging wet, living wild a while, and dying bent begging more time

Even worst suffering whom pleasure never sanctified go not gladly to die

Cursed with hope which woman first eloping with sense in opening Pandora’s chest sentenced all to

Groping with fingerless hands in clammy sweetsmelling lazarets where priests in dark, austere dress impress wetness on speckled brows

Like roped sailors screaming over siren songs, utterly in thrall to persistence

Shaking what were heads in defiant, ever rising skyward higher to the Idea

Form first which thought dawns

Bursting forth at time’s birth

Draining touch fair maiden maven sapped.

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Indexes of tyrants, would-be Byrons, poor cooks and hookers

Those struck dead suddenly, praying to Barbara sullenly

Long sufferings sizing death as succouring

Plainly hideous, happily ever afters

Village idiot, helot and master

The Spartan, the Athenian, the Delian triaster with its high masted triremes

The harlot and casket carrier, mothers and unmarrieds, the keen

Whom to unpromised days plotted bold courses

Pride goeth before a somersault, ever falling fortress of living

Fortified by abounding death, united neither by breath nor breadth of experience but by terminal ends

Assurance of our residences’ impermanence

We shall emerge glistening, sweat, blister and be away urgently

We shall be trenchant, or dig trenches along salients, or lend ear to less fortunates

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Occurrence of demise these miles round 

How to fit six souls on a Styx slowboat

Without Charon falling in

Incurring gondolier’s chagrin

From deathbed to Bardo

Last of thinking 

Last of inking

Whispering sod below which linger broken-bodied corn kings

They sing out to me, calling me Prince

I am old and cruel-throated, thwarted often 

Factotum but never a master, I am Jack of all things 

I am plaster cast of an age’s finest marbles

I am bastard last of old Gaelic bards

I am maenad, thyrsus armed and ‘pard-armoured

I climb withershins like a beak-deft butterfly on newborn wings 

Upon wrinkled pillows, an old poet’s ardoured form

Desk of art’s creation busy with stationery, marks of monomania

His friends according to his last testament lend them to the flames

Opened grate into which they are fed, like the infanticidal Tophet

What worlds they discerned, what oils from without bled from heaven to that pen

What fames their publication may have entailed are consumed by brazier’s sawing flame.