Alchemisland

Steel by my side slip inside a saloon and join the pasteboards

Sawdust thrown on the floorboards to soak up upchuck, lords

And ladies pay to be away from such places, I take my place

Big blind I keep pace, half stack, soon down to brass tacks

Hobnail boots up for grabs, lose them fast like a passage through the mire

They admire my playing, as like enjoy my entire wage conveyed to their coffers

I cough like a man not long for the coffin, why not play on

I still have a shirt and socks, and a wedding ring with a diamond

Roll a joint though I swore I wouldn’t, soon I’m swooning cussing

Like a player with a concussion, losing much of what I made today

Coming in hot, the money is swapped, fuck it baby lost all I got

Took a job rustling cattle, never looked back, a tenuous candle

Burns in my wind-racked shack, such a racket, outhouse out back

This is the outback, the bush, the cracked and cursed earth

Akin to Cush if you recall the good book, knife couldn’t cut mustard

I spy circling buzzards, they know something is up, they are in coven

Above me and I curse them for the umpteenth

Suffering, a man with golden teeth comes and speaks to me

His serpent speech is much pleasing, this bleached blazing place keen to put paid me

He seems to dissuade, the sun at bay as he makes his way, I am led to a cave

Though I have many times taken this way I had never before seen its grave mouth

So keen to receive me, the foot of the mound, the stairs proceeding downwards

Receding into darkness, far now from the farms and townlands, moving along

A harness, it seems harmful and my arm bound by some charm is armoured

To my will for release and escape, I can but go doggedly onward as he chose

This way this way I am in the deepest bowels of this cave

A smell of sulphur insults this place, miasmic haze, traces of splintered staves

Made to stay the walls in antient day when the first miners cleaved with spade.