Alchemisland

Finally every star in alignment

Earning a living from writing is primary

I must do myself this kindness

I am close to blindness with misery

I see before me a world blanched and piteous

With pity for me, I see only smog scree and bleached Edens

I am half-eaten, moths flee when the jacket is rattled

Rattling off my usual spiel, rabbitting on

My job submerges me in slowrotting honey

Bees, wasps and worse chew through my flesh, exposing my tummy

My wounds are like soldier-breached runny eggs, xanthous sap running down my legs

Pegs for noses when my wounds must be dressed

Left in the west-facing pagoda, everyone is talking backwards Yoda

Play the track backwards Satanic tracts in the album opener

Crackling sound you get on vinyl, hacking sound of cracking rifles

Lead I copped an eyeful, pikey in the gaff pulling out copper wiring

Wiry enough to run if a copper comes, scrum before the cup final

Tell the lads I’ll kill them if we don’t win, run like the wind

Half Crowley, half John McGahren, evincing pious and profane patterns

Alternating masks, participating in courtly masques to advance

My grand plans, I must find a way to stand on my own feet

I must find a way to make my bleeding more palatable

I hear chirping, bleating of sheep needing feeding

Frenzy feeding fit for 5000, when my weed reaches season

I’m poison on the seeds, teaching heeding young my treasons

My breast heaving without good reason, my ravings are easily

Better than your best works you spend weeks on, I’m weak

And death’s balm, that cream, is easeful, death comes creeping

When I sleep but leaves me, living is suffering enough easily

Deleting everything in a fit of madness

Milk of human kindness gone bad

Those who knew me in better climates, who barely recognize me, whisper I am mad

I am no more or less than evil animate, what purports to kindness is hidden villainy

Lost islands betwixt Isolde and Tristan, whose tryst became mythic legend

I am at the twisted roots of a tree a million years before antiquity

Sephiroth-like baubles on a rotting Tamarisk, Osiris tricked by Set

Into a chest of his dimensions, censured in a tree bole for centuries

His removed sex is symbolized by the obelisk, his sisterwife Isis

Insistent on finding it, sends men out on fetch quests whether they like it

Or not, will anyone help the widow’s son, I find the greenskinned one

In a wood outside Dublin, a tree double the size of its brothers

Smothering all others in want of effulgence, greedy guts

Gust blew and branches swung as if they swum through a sylvan sea

The chest I see is surely that which holds thee, eked out in filigree

Runes and glyphs which taught high pharaonic magics to Moses

Air here cold, somehow older, I blow away the coating dust

Bringing my cuff to my coughing place, fearing mouldgrowth

Removing old growth I get a good hold and haul from its stow

The box that holds the king of old, Osiris skinned as the grass which grows

Over the mounds raised 6,000 years ago, his domain extended from Aswan

To Alexandria in the North, where a horned conqueror sought his limit’s exhaustion

The land its people called Kemet, where wise poet kings and blood drinkers played Senet

Who was the black land’s first true lord, King Menes and King Narmer vye for that honour

Five names draped upon each God, consigning the stele bearing your name to burning flames

Geb begat Isis on Nut, Shu’s daughter, who oversaw that which flew over

In his chest coffin, I find flail sceptres, bird feathers and a reed-woven helmet

Isis rests her kite wings, her husband at last in sight, alighting upon him he slips inside

Conferring child upon his bride, the mischievous warchild Horus, exploring her contours

Like a man mapping the moon, she gifts me a boon, I ask for a holy wound

Blood exuding, her husband now exhumed returns to the world’s upstairs.