Alchemisland

One eye I prized, outpryed

Given for knowledge

Access to that well

Whose waters below hell

Deeper delving, to the world’s wellsprings

Wherein dwells cursed water worded by hidden things

Worms ring it, gnawing at the roots of the world tree

I drink it, gaining knowledge unworldly

My once dull eyes are brought to a pearl finish, sheening

Where once a shallow eelless stream coursed, teeming

Now the roaring torrent, alive with vole and turbot and linnet

Dragonflies like wartime flyers divebombing, haunting when still

Instilling all my sight with brightness, unsettled mind at last quietens

I put aside the trident, symbolic of my violence

My tried and tested ways, now expired, pry away

Like weeds from off a grave, today is not my burial day

I see ways where before impassable thorn mazes

Displayed themselves disbarringly, I charge them

Like the enemy had trained no archers, arches

Cast halving shadows across me, I am no longer Hamlet

I am given course, and all which seemed stolid ice

Is revealed as a yielding frost, malleable, endorsing

My legs with vigour heretofore unfelt, such vim and vinegar

As felt in one’s twenties is suddenly emptied back into my tank

I wear a golden cuirass and the knobbled shield of Lough Gur

Struck thrice by the finding farmer, I am resplendent in my armour

As I make my way back through the car park, to much alarum

Doubtless I will be on Instagram, hash tag madman hash tag atlantis

But let them have their fantasies and me mine, I am of that class of mind

Which unsettled utterly by cruel reality simply another finds, there residing

Until times of strife, when little by little I must be let back out

Into what is perhaps the real, snout out first, slow and furtive

Ginger at first but soon my thirst for extroversion resumes

With the moon it seems, I bay to it, my gloom’s commencing

I do not lament it, mention of it perhaps that inner tension

Is invention’s true source, that which I from thy divorces

Eye for eye in the days before Moses

Gloam before me, coming bulldozers

Like some cunning unseen wasp swarm.