Alchemisland

Don’t care if I’m solo, expecting no guests

I dress best hiding inner duress, alone wearing a rusty tiara

Browned wedding gown’s dirt penned into epochs like layered dessert

Repeating my day of hurt, coating dust robes a book

A brook of unbroken light smiting stubborn stillness by smouldering flight

Spills across a shoddy diadem’s scarred diamonds, lost lustre regained

Momentarily a faded, near-ending Empire remade with prime’s bluster

Full colour, hulking monolith to targetless desire demands worship

Blood quotient, gore tithe, war’s wines, votive torture, secret admissions

I’m a high kill sniper in peacetime, discontent with a farmer’s life and lot

We all long formers and wish futures, doing ourselves harm, poor creatures

Richmen dreaming of having nothing

Whilst the poor prize what they’ve got, medicine for seizures

Tears seize me, freezing on my forked clay cheeks, nothing left to say

Oaken throne bottled sylvan smoke spoke in silk hinting brown opal

Like a voice in old age frail fails to convey, none will obey, deposed Pope

Clinging to his robes like the last of hope, confined to some dismal eyrie

Given food, and rope

What is left for the quiet soothsayer who will not say, who can say?

Back in my day, I remember being called your highness

I remember barons showing beggars kindness

I remember when the bog held a world, when we feared the barrow

And hawthorn trees our heath held, snowcapped in unmelting season

Called fairy trees, branches melded with pendent wishes, string and tissue

Though we teased, none dared interfere with those trees

Interceding at pruning’s suggestion

I knew someone who saw a fairy, swore she hadn’t luck a day since

Things which sight cannot decode, things highted demons in old time

Move in the gloom of my room of sighs, the moon made lives

On marble, light marvels which climbed and mouldered

Spoke of a divine silently then died quickly as they arrived

All night all Her childs at delight, spry like no eye spied them

Denying them nothing, I do not pry

Watching silently as a troupe of diaphanous orphans laugh

Unto collapsing, running laps sprinting madly hands aloft

Clasped behind backs in mockery of slower runners

Pupils of a school where late comes the news of death

All below the age of ten, none of a man’s tendency evinced

In movement akin to swimming, they were bright shadows lingering

And seemed half to slither and half to be lifted, footless drifting

Short as Limericks they tousled and pushed in roughhousing

Horseplaying seeming to stay in orbs the moon at pains to paint

Through the stained windowpanes depicting martyrs’ painful ends

Grace alien in this plane, moving like; perfect prose;

Swanfeather milk; acorns thrilled from silk; phoenix elixirs

Each pale and giggling, clinging as do stubborn children

To their final instance, in an instant the visitants are delivered

A shiver from within, a chill in the room I am in, a din

I heard or hoped to have heard lurched to familiar nothing

Pins dropping were heard like clashing bells, the birds

Left their turrets and turned, half-guided, in the gyre.