Alchemisland

Ceasing occident

Fusing orient

Furies heavensent

Orbs bent out of orbit.

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You said that ere he existed, he was now dead or merely hated existence

Loathing creation, artist lately elated devastated at what truthing light reads failure

Feeding a novel into the hungry grate

Sating themselves with loathing of him, with sin

Styxworthy indictments frightening angels sent as sentries to cider-scented orchards, made grizzly torture place

Dormant ages mute to miracles stirring awake

Long-torpid torches rising to sawing fires, aborting themselves with strength own

Quick-spending pyres splatter walls pied, tied hands of the saintly made recusant

Who kneel not refusant subject to vile abuses like muses reading modern verse

Effusive in discipline, he makes wicked house and sinful branch sprint to fire

Splintering roofs, wolves haunting royal tombs

For insolence, for indigence, for indecency and impiety, disappearing from Earth’s face

Cains of this age need not confine themselves to eastern Eden’s Nod

Eve’s begotten son merely bottom rung of self-satisfying ladder to Babel’s tip

Actium dead floating, appearing minor infractions once impactions commence

Cattle looking to the sky-rending hand of the abactor whose arrival they disavowed, much affected

Limbs corroded by infection such as must sawn off; seared, cauterized then sutured when putrefaction execrates

Amazement as dimwits through mazes sent they are hedged

Ariadne’s thread led to a monster-haunted centre, ossuarial splendour

A citadel housing generations of dead Athenians, out which the fleeing speed

Spears spent on chest of nearing creature split like reeds at dam’s breeching, keeling splintered

Fanning flames, failing to attain fame in worthy measure

To His glories you afforded tepid adorations

Nations which barred His name’s elation shamed.

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Coming of the Great Turk 

Burdened West freed of work, full of dulcifying luxuriance 

Excess not seen since Egypt, since old Luxor of golden doors and floors 

Every man a cad 

Every woman a whore

Every prophet proved right dubbed mad 

Babies crammed like sardines into Tophet

Sultan’s Sipahi, elite infantry corps, war-arrayed

Marches not since Alexander’s men crossed Hindustan 

Fanning plumes, plum-coloured sashes denoting royal preference

Barded horses clanking like haunted armour 

Cog-riven automatons, here to see off the autochthons

Working to ruin oft-idlers, kept to strident rules in a trident kingdom

They raise curling turrets to Termagant

Ox carts bring broken rocks from freed oxgangs, future home of black mosques

Black, oily rocks tossed down by Nameless Players line its pillars 

Eyes of healers stabbed out

Repentant only when the pendant sway of Damocles’ steel deals its fatal blows.