Alchemisland

You must understand my need to escape

It is like I have been raped everyday for a decade

This job has utterly debased me

No case can be made for it

Is it me or it which cannot be saved

Dismayed to find it me.

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I am at Ballard’s exhibition of atrocities, numb to the oddities

I run my once-pierced tongue along my once-plum teeth

Hair greasy from my hands running through it, pushing it back

Cannot go home anymore, no going back

I can only be Bach, who said that

Much of what was good now extracted, one last gaze at a scathed face

Leftover earth seen through rocket glass, gaseous fracked and fractured.

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A different class of impact

Science had no scale for, that’s what magic was made for

Who cast it, clashing rock cascading disastrously

Fisted the Atlantic gigantic tsunami.

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My life a nose, this job so much mustard

Nudging myself, muster son muster

Forth from drudgery go

Summon courage or belly’s custard

I stand at last and not the last time, Custer

Cussing them out as cads and buzzards, all bluster

They come near I cut them with the cutlass

Veal cutlets suddenly abundant when I unsheath

Shave some layers off your onions, spare seats at the table

Only eight will be eating, because Cain killed Abel 

I want to be free like pirate cable

I want to go, when and where I am able

I want not to be constrained

I want to be, not paraded, but certainly applauded

I will not be upbraided, stressed to artlessness, or framed a dullard

Under the yoke of work

I am no sweating Turk at work sweeping Hagia Sophia of pigeon dirt

I am a clever wizard in a ruffled shirt

My muscles ripple, with me it’ll work out for sure

I strike out for shore after I’m thrown overboard

Thrice score kilometres or more

Even though I never trained, can’t swim and was caught short

I make it there in record time

That’s not me being cocksure, that’s the luck of the irish

We are all pirates dressed nicely, ivy climbery social climbers

All of us a little of Barry Lyndon, I think

I’m standing at the kitchen sink drinking water

My soul black as porter, mantle thane of Cawdor

Caught short shy my piss pot must relieve on the rock shore

Where she was selling seashells, my taxes to the Seychelles.