Alchemisland

Alabama

Day after homes under the hammer

So much sawdust, like a meat factory

Your man needed a bandana

Used to have a sweet home 

Like a fairy tale witch

Hoping to lure Hansel in

Handles on the oven’s inside 

Hang on while you sizzle

Bought the lands it sat on

Locals my kind spat on 

Told the builders crack on

Pillars topped by dragons 

Overgrown briar

Bramble spilling over onto the road 

The rose garden’s Kraken

It was like a place in the Hamptons

Something cast out the heavens 

Something pleasant does last forever 

It didn’t last but C for effort

I’d been living there twelve months

Few lookers in the bunch, mostly munters 

Faces butter, butterly utterly

Anyone mutter at me, brother 

Get a Ballymun uppercut 

One night met a dish, someone pinch 

Cutie says her name is Judy, truly

Punch me, let’s get lunch

Bedding you my call of duty

Texting you that call of booty, no please

Half past two Wednesday eve

Asking the bus driver for extra speed

Seeing heaven coming of hell 

I couldn’t stop staring, shell shock 

Her nails shellac shocking black 

Black tar inside my trachea, lake

Take two scene two in the photobooth 

Looking too cute in the two by two 

Friends smell a rat maybe, do you? 

I smell nothing, flu

Met a girl scoring twelve, looked elvish

Took me by the mind’s wrist 

Slipped on a bind 

Applying poison colour to her lips

Red, turning blue as we tryst

Reverse Santa putting gifts back in the box

She rinsed me, spin cycle 

Psycho, took me for all I’ve got 

You’ve never seen someone like her 

Knows just when to smile 

Shark full of guile, Nile crocodile 

Mine, for just a while

I don’t go there anymore

It brings back all the hate 

I don’t think much on those days

Once I looked in, parked up at the gate

It was rusted orange, padlocked shut 

Like something from a grander age 

Setting for a stage, some grand play 

What was I thinking, god save

A decade now since that day 

I will not go around again that way

It has been conveyed 

The old place is well decayed

Ivy climbing it, hated granddad’s grave 

Untended, neither pick nor spade 

Nor deserving a saviour.