Alchemisland

Lost and found, the Anduin sound thought to drown the ring bound

To its makers ancient hate, a knight in sable plate leaves an intact plate

Upon retiring, offers no goodbyes but silently slips out, farewell Irish

A loose eyelash pressing with unbearable gentility against a gelid blue Iris

Once flower queen, now a painted and petalbare stamen, fraught with age

Her once-amazing beauty fades with each day, art left in the rain

She cranes at his rising, her sights trained on her beloved rival, in height

Kin to giants, such height as defines and permits defiance, he was a vine

Whose coiled origins bathed in clouds, inclined such as he was to cloudiness

Ever Mercury’s fluxsome habit, the switch from babble and gabbling

To funereal sternness, his terminal impermanence, his utmost earnestness

Contrasting his easy churlishness, quick to chide or charm, a dime turned

And his fires were on, he liked to leave early and never hung on beyond

The time whence afterwards his glib mask absconded showed him haunted

Far from the wanted guest, kept close to breast and even given deference

As one different, a colourful dissident to whom all must listen in

Such shimmering silvery visages, the artifice of twisted witches, soon the bitterness

Recomes with twice cumbrance, a cutlass to his term as bon viveur

Revealed as bilious and turgid, a deceptive version hiding the adverse

Such inversion of reputations exceeds that seen in Caesar among the Senate

At his seizing of power, of his seasons in sacred, seedy Egypt, how eager

Then the knives are invited behind me, my backside as if wine dropped thereon

Around me a throng of unheeded ides, the foliate crown green as Ireland 

Shatters upon striking the marble, the pious baulk at his omen, a Tyrian purple throw

Is thrown over the bloodied foe, even in death his lion vigour is shown, his throes

Frozen onto his stilled bones unlike one going cowardly towards his own

Maker, nor one who died violently, but stately and placid as having died silently

In defiance of their treachery, the emptied carapace of the effaced imperial Caesar

Seemed to be reaching out, eagerly seeking the hems of friend deceivers