Alchemisland

Following as up to Carlow

Shadow seen often in my parlour

Pallor pallid, taciturn manner even placid

He acid which substance reducts at touch

Black-cloaked mystical soul movement

Tedious tasks of plainly-bored immortals

Like a gaol cell wall on which martyrs have scrawled names and droll missives asking rebellion and censure’s erasure

His scored countenance lesion-legioned

Pits where living eyes resident millipedes set forth from

Performing upon me flesh’s final alchemies, singular valency

All mortals forming toward mythic extracts

Toward that crack like a slash along a spine, Christflank scars, yon worldful portal

Life’s ceasing

In that rod a scarlet-sashed peltast casts angrily in battle, steadfast, a creasing

Which over time and by degrees stoops me, walking corner angled

When dead me wheels down pathologistic corridors, coroners waving new fangled tools over my breathless body, bread ready to be leavened

Feeling breath levant-hot, though keel unmoving renders pilot passenger

Preaching time’s lesson litany 

When time’s preaching

When overreaching ends,

At Earth’s end, bend of raging river deep in Hindu Kush

Defending to his men glory’s name, their doubt would not stain

All dead blameless, healed of lameness in Hades 

Those who stayed behind untamable and hateful

With sin’s weight we cannot hope heaven but try at least

My soul will go like barnacle geese in Sligo out over foam

I would have noisy exodus

Let Mort’s ossuarial hands band mine, palm to bone

At my dying little crying, white dyes mordanted black

Let doleful epicedians be heard from the church, mordent

From sordid cellars soiled, let rats more than harried Hamelin crawl forth

On yon high hillcurve wind-stirred furze shaking like cursed Virgils

Voidal facade of black church, lines of sad faces filing 

Through a door divide windriding threnodies, unmelodious urgent dirges

Odious and copious

On the pulpit Procopius’ Secret History, its tongue tastes pages fifty through fifty three, which detail the repeated rape of child whore Theodora.