Alchemisland

Wax cast of my own face worn as a mask, wolf wool-wearing faux flock

Waving my Tullamore ashplant to lull the masses into disastrous fandom

Blocks of flats chocoblock with rats twisttailed

Swab any inch of the wall, test green for scabies

Rotten like Johnny, how it’s still standing ask the man

Rubber johnny tumescent with ballbutter slung there after a shagging

Ops and neighbours alike getting battered by tomorrow’s captains

Decamping redoubts to push dangerous capstan spokes pain’s wheel

Until they break, rubberspined

Dead inside, the next gen file in

Babies got babies, raiders cop rape charges

Giving cheek earns a fist

Caught ratting your life’s curtailed

Your frail ma will be tailed by heavies doing her messages, it’s that serious

Keep the creed, say nothing to the police

Loud packs hubcap, money lookit all that

Oilwell, shoulders knees and toes

Gold rings every finger like a fortune teller flinging reversed tarot portrait

Well versed in the necromantic rites

Despoiling tombs, rudiments for tonight

I never saw that in me life officer

Honestly, God or the Divil take me

I’m not faking, wha! Someone laced me

They say they’ve traced it back to me

Boys make sure I got the blame

Most denizens, fine citizens, summered in the jail adjacent

His bird dressed up to celebrate his return

Girl’s eager, ride or die, no equal to Aoife no meaner either

No cleaning done since I was last here

Smeared windows like Robocop swerved into radded Merv

Weather yellow feathers, like a golden eagle

What nails remain stick out dangerously

Backside of the crucifix arm

Backfist slap, smack across the mouth

The Nazarene is pale, his light flickering out

Vinegar, not water, to moisten his mouth

It’s like someone chucked a crust punk grenade

Think you’ve seen filth and depravity

Nothing compares to this cavity, Sinéad

Fatima Mansions gaunt gloam-eyed junkie phantoms

Ghost feet shuffling along the landing lino

Due to fall, falling, fell, should lain low

Tenement towers like granite sentinels

Selling heroin and benzos in stairwells

Even the tiles are sweating

In the toilet injecting something made for either vets or medics

Right into my dick fast to the vein

Saw a man beaten to death with hammers for piping up, shit was vedic.

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Graven riddles, Grenfell’s fittings and fixtures

Oil and fire a potent mixture

Ask the browless alchemist when he comes out sootblack

Once met a man whose granny burnt her back

Black on an old style metal radiator

She fell asleep against it, exhausted with hunger, heat ate her

Flensed her flesh like a hunter does a hunted hind’s

Or stopheart hart’s hide 

She was flayed and scarred for life.

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That was her keepsake of the tenement she resided in

Three families to a room, six adults to a bed

Cholera on the cockhorse, death as dust upon a ledge

Land of proud scholars, miracles

Puzzling henges denizens of ancient Éireann erected

Corrupted like milk in a neglected pail

Subsisting on Guinness and suffering

Yet what poetry sources from lips bitten

Like warped wallpaper upon a flood

Confessions dispatched from the original disinherited

I run to meet you, Marathon’s breathless messenger

When you get there, tell them Leonidas sent ya

Stitch in my side has me bent over, more like Ephialtes

Meet you as agreed outside a Centra on the southside

Box of Leonidas chocolates

Crossed by two Lilies of the Roadside.