Alchemisland

Praying to Saint Joseph for a house

Can’t wait until I’m old

Something has gotta go

Set-hippopotamus harpooned by the new pharaoh

Battling for love of black cat Bast

Handsome cow-eared Hathor music-eager

Impassioned beyond, it’s majnun

Decorating walls with wadjet symbols wallahi 

One-eyed Magi, enemies call me cyclops, those let survive feed my rep

The flesh of the dead feeds my sacred reptiles, temple pools at Arsinoe

Painted rose red with man’s dissipating flower

Sneferu who rules the waves before England’s empire grew

Preceded that by two thousand years times two

My reign foes spend underfoot, otherwise prosperity, staple crops and stable trade

Senusret but more wrathful, chosen by Osiris to lead the new pagan Irish 

More talented with my fingers than Chopin

My robes with a wide span, wife who pales her tan, sweetfish and melon and teadance

Shogun out of Japan just landed on the isle of Éireann

Unsparing in my usurpation, declaration age of mayhem

Graceful sage but keep your pace, miss a payment I turn to rage and hate

Your villages will be razed, sweep repeat until a name is given to me

Crafty nosy neighbours visiting me in night’s secrecy, naming names

Blaming those they hate, who they have argued with over land claims

Or who have paid them some unrecognised disrespect, feeling them due pain

Some of their own medicine, just a taste

On first night taking brides for rolls in the hay, arise a man to make England pay

A pint of blood from each will be claimed, as payment for days taken, routes not taken

An ancient spirit within us is wakened, fires burning awakening pagans

State cannot withstand its people, once grand estate now rotting staves

Like the clod-breaching rib bones of buried whittled whales, bay’s shale

A haunting shade of pale in the wan light of the armoured moon

A pale shade haunting me to the reaches, reaching land’s end

Downward descending to wending waves, toward my ending

At the sucking swail, selvedge of sylvan realm

Where hedgerow gods dwell, where robed hedgehogs build beehive prayer cells

I must be an anchorite though I am outwardly a socialite, I have become unanchored

Severed hempen hawsers, my galley unmoored turning the Severin to a froth

When the frost is all over and the moor is painted gold

I will struggle to the menhir, about which tales are told

I will paint its front with essence to summon its soul

At its centre, seated in the grave-reckoned hole

Journeying far as an astral kestrel, demented astronaut in an unsettling realm

A spoiled milky way is despoiled by the boil-lancing spears of a world-ending rock

It knocks aside planets in transit, causing astrological panic

The atmosphere so carefully managed by a planetary harmony is damaged

Beyond repair, tainting the very air, the altered angle of the battered planet

We see a ruinous sky fore and aft, a divine bloodbath, anything in the path

Of that atomsmashing godcast comet is demolished, where it lands it leaves polished glass

The heat of that blast hardens the ground dust to a muscular diamantine slush

New rivers rushing forth across New York, the forked implement above us soars

At last the slash of that Damoclean sword, long awaiting exhorder

Plunged into disorder, the armies accused of ritual torture

The final overture as the curing waves overthrow the impurity

The utter fury of his utterances, the water climbing the buttresses

The chords are cut with angelic cutlasses, the seas seizing no land’s circumference

Left to comfort the long-suffering landlubbers, the flooding drinks down London

The great places go under in the thunder of his long-awaited displacements

Trumpets signal seals to reveal the flavour of their atrocity

All pomposity composited on the ocean floor, vanity to sediment

Anguish at the end of humanity, the empire had languished

To insufferable attitudes, and for that we are vanquished

The waves which drank Atlantis again outfountain

As in Noah’s last fantasies, all nothing in amounting

Final accounting, the vile accountant corpse counting

The dead in rank mountains, vindicated prophets shouting

From the tops of mountain ashes, decrying wicked practice

All heads are removed by a single swing of his taxing axe.