Alchemisland

No spare key, talk sparingly 

Deceptively arranged to lead your mind on a thought train

Miles away from the right way, lead astray but mind games

My mind is like a sniper’s scope trained on greatness

Going ghost after a cyber attack crashes the grid

Air traffic exploding, raining down twisted metal and melted plastic

A bag of hands washes up along the coast of the North Atlantic

Heard sticks snapping, grabbed my Panasonic camera in a panic

Face to face with bigfoot but when I snapped a picture he vanished

I have an old map written in Spanish purporting to lead to a varnished city

Built from burnished gold, icons gilded in the most vanitied livery

Witches at liberty to use perplexing glamors speak ill grammars

Grimoires inherited from grizzled maven grandmas, showed me something amazing

Behind the barn, all I was capable of and more, inheritance to which I was born

Moulded to a certain form, begat during century’s storm, born malformed

Child with tail and claws, hingeless snake jaws, of course soon orphaned

I was raised on Mount Olympus, Zeus’ place for tea and biscuits, mythic in-laws

In roads to the mystic, what rose at Rhodes sank to the Aegean and sleeps

Steeped in water, puddles pearling on the tempered blade, blazing hot

Saying my prayers on the top floor of the house, forming a plan

To exeunt the planet after my performance in Hamlet

My cats eating a mouse like the mares of Diomedes eat a man

Fool me twice, like my second performance beside King Lear

Ideas to penetrate what can’t be seen, a wind made of cedar seen

To turn serpentine, slithering ophidian near my heelturn, halt screeching

Tar bubbling, smoke from the wheel burn, Turner painting of a weir 

Turned weird by the queer drink I take to clear my head and think

Alchemical admix, world’s weight fucking heavy, world’s greatest Fulcanelli

I visit sites with ritual intention, slithering from the spiteful night my unkind brethren

Leathern wings outspreading like spilled ink across vellum splayed on an eagle lectern

My words are head turning, heads wormturning, unfurling my burning inferno tapestry

Furlough even though it’s never been busier on Grafton Street, floating voters

Have agreed with vacuous far right creeds as a way to vent steam from ears

Blood is gonna flow through these streets, a shadow cast down the years

This decade’s reeling in the years will be marked over eighteen, and invite tears

Remembering the tyranny, the empty lyrics that made the present seem eternity

The enmity between the different flavoured seeds God had breathed

Onto, his breath the holy font, his sleeve the dead hold onto, grew

For a long time away from the faith of those who came before me

A new strain for a new age was the thought I gave shape 

But older now I revert to the time-tested and proven, that which is ageless

Today is but today, tomorrow is a different place, where different ways prevail

We are the serpent chasing and devouring its own tail

Forgetting that we are the tellers of the tale

Will future ages discern with due irony our sarcastic babble

Will they be so elastic as to understand our troubles

Or will they as we do cast scorn upon our ways

How hateful and pagan-seeming seemed they, and so close to our own day

It could never happen again, not here, not now, no way

When the levee breaks the rest is taken away, a lake where dead men lay

Every dog has its day, a moon-baying wolf obeying ordinances of Satan

Clergy and laity, gaiety of the aristocracy ended by my rending

Tenderised men, vats of human fat rendering unto glue, halls of violent gloom

Tomb of all evil men, the amount imprisoned therein grew with each new

Culture that bloomed, glueing themselves to ruinous practices, worshipping runes

Dancing beneath moons, astrally travelling on babe-slathered brooms

Resined my wand with the womb’s unpleasant, unwanted fruit

Poisons blooming in my humourless greenhouse, rumours of greenskinned things slithering

Colour children of green knowe, I know the answer before you asked but don’t know how

Phones ringing I know it’s him, epilepting across the windowsill, let it ring out

Take my magic ring out from its hiding place and toss it in the fire, banding undoubtedly

Fearing banditry of a relic this powerful I promptly exile, seeking cryptic palindromes

In the homes of former alchemists, every cookbook is a spell codex, every pot an alembic

I am spell-obsessed, can’t get upset since my soul got sent, idiotic

To trade soul for shot at gold but tired of mixer, pick, hod overshoulder

We oversold how much we overthrew England, six counties still under the wrong flag, quickmafs

Dodging the boulder as I emerge from the tomb looking ten years older, grail quest over

Told her I’d be a year then spent seven in desert exile, Majnun I return prodigal and prophesied

I wield a prophet’s eye after my desert time, 33 in one year’s time, 40 days equal nights

I can descry lightful motes of angel hope

The shining helmets of his host

Through the ashen moat of our world below

Bestowed with a rope, going from one world to another

On a Roman patina a stonewritten sphinx riddle I am eager to decode

Hailing Nodens, I ask him for knowledge no man knows, my blood his throat

Which is the wode ocean, woe to those going before me at my time of showing

Inkwell quill dipping, finely-groomed quim dripping

Lips her lips until her hips insist otherwise

Fist her, left fist to pink on Twister

Mistrial, I went mist eyed and killed this guy but I had a good disguise

Misfit in ill-fitting clothes, Ifrit a joint end, sniffing if it’ll fit up my nose

Pinocchio nose no truth knowing how my stash growing

Lock of her hair in my locket, Jiminy Cricket telling me how to jimmy the lock

I knock it off to unlock the lockbox, shock jock how I talk shit, lips compost

Get you so you are not compos mentis, no accomplice, call the dentist

Identify you by your dental records, apparently you were due a check up

Now all that’s left of you is black dust, the forest ground your pyre tattooed

Hepped up on loods, all these chicks are too young for you

Now I’m an old fuck, overlong in the tooth, my renown grew

With each foe I slew, each time I drew my blade it glowed more blue

Azure in my hand, orc coming after you

Transforming into different animals, hawk tuah rhino and back

Tony Hawk how I get back on when I fall off, triple backflip when I’m 64

Dropped rings in the sewer, shot shooters consigned there too

Crocodiles nest like a jeweller with some tools, haunted gun I shot the fool

With pity, always aces, no faces no cases, put him away, blasted out the casement

Splattered on the pavement his head clattered breaking his braincase, brain puce on pave

Barely made the fifth page of today’s publication, I should be caged for public provocation

But they heap upon me adulation, no remand or chains for flagrant lawbreaking

Not the titties but Straight A’s in my bullet’s flight test, not one I let fly missed

Haven’t since been dissed, gib a man into a red mist, raining giblets forget men Geri

Gerrymandering carving up maps by lanternlight, whole territory for Mike

Can’t be beaten at Risk, no one will take that title, hell to either side of my tightrope

Make sure rope is tight around the beams before I kick the chair back and leap

Three hours it took to strangle me, turning purple dangling, kicking feet

Make sure your neck breaks next time, Satan told me it’d be a piece of cake

Feet of clay in concrete boots, sleeping with the shooter where one places a kid’s tooth

Point and shoot ain’t no Time Crisis II, get all who cause me crises in a line and ice them

Slowgoing ghost train through a tunnel of goats

Mouth open receiving rancid hosts

Blackclad blokes in robes with collared throats

A language full of curses, piety and solemn oaths

A sound like rocks grown to madness.