Alchemisland

More laughs than a comedy when I snap your branches in half

More edification in my odious fiction than found in a homily

The prodigy is presently vomiting behind the auditorium

Anxious about his promise, the pressure, rising alarum

Having a mare, Diomedes, pulling my hair out, tufts between

My fingertips clumps torn cleanly, ripped trying to peel me

Learnt potions and poisons from a Magi in Medici employ

He instructed me in the planting of May Rowans

Of the fashioning of omen-deriving divining devices at home

How the comb found on the ground has fallen from the banshee’s gown

How in special places often one senses hidden forces girdled round

Current beneath that ground, ripples spreading across a sound

At a rock’s loud pronouncement, drowning that languid office 

Stooping branches like hot giraffes bathing in brown, silt-hued shallows

Where a shoeless, rock-pocketed widow assumes the posture of a drowned

Lying on wet grass on the bank, arms crossed on her chest, awaiting death

In the temple of the weeping clown, her black weeping gown worn a whole calendar

Now streaked with her calumnious, calamitous passage, snapped at by branches

Torn into tranches, raggled triangles in frayed bunches like bunting at a birthday luncheon

The truncheon of the sun falls in trenchant judgement, the accused wait in rigid tension

Shivering dollbody and dentures on varnished benches made from armourhard branches

My green-sodden prosody the mustneeds of a monominded monomaniac

Composition need attacks me, positionally informed by battle tactics

Perfected by long practice, strange mysteries attract me, reality elastic

Once I purge with burning the tract on which I inscribed what I’m after

My cursed hands answering an erring master, errand boy hereafter

I drink blood-tinged soldier milk, eating ironbowls of riot swill

Mixed rusted nails and crushed nyquil, blood running down my lips and chin

As I take my fill from a vial of sin, vileness housed within main ingredient

Shyness over, cowed and too proud or cowardly to hit back, deep bowing

I have found deep in the bole the river of my power

Your highness from now on

Glowering at my subjects, seeing the flowering of my objectives, ejecting invective

In my menacing poems, in fact pacts with fanged princes with Latin names, shivering

Without livery, shriving beneath the moon made-up unliving, asking what to give

I spy a glimpse of something yet to be, cursing me to live on

Some use yet to fulfil before my blood can be wholly spilled

I must complete with honours my holy mission

My happy memories seem to go missing, I am forbidden from listening

To the hissing arcing out from history’s beginning, which is His singing

Drawing mirrors on a shimmering obsidian monolith with my nightquill.