Alchemisland

Form a queue, I’m looming

Many irons, gardens blooming

I’m Jeremy Irons in irons

Confined to a crooked tower around which ill-natured storms gyre

Ate brains and got prions, my little eye will spy on

Show weakness then pile on

My soul flies like a pilum upon my getting high; numb

Higher numbers, still feel I’m tumbling like clothes in the dryer

Whole pyre required to light it

So much weed stuffed inside, kite high nightsky

Eclipse front row I might try that Mithraic rite of which Herodotus writes

Called liar but archaeology proves him right most times

I believe what he said, what he divined, his works a triumph

My body endures trials before tonight’s ritual, workings over ritual knives

Mirrors for scrying, victuals for the dying

Lost ghostly tribes from worlds behind

Lines between realms, communion divine, brine salt confines

Celebrants during spells, iron a feared metal in Hell

Unsettled, book pages flutter unmoved

Mercury dropping in a darkened room

Palaver with Paimon in my parlour, half past the day’s third hour

Flowers wilting at a black duke’s coming, darkness his caul and front

Abundant malformations lingering on the fringes of information

Fridge temperatures throughout the house, open door to the basement

Breath spied inside as if servants forgot to close the casements

Cold joy-erasing, racing heart evincing presence

Cold as a tenement, prescience preternatural

Djinn in thrall to Termagant majnun

Smashed nun’s ghost, threw herself from a window

Bloodied robes, priests who filled her holes filled the hole in which she was thrown

Groaning sounds above, below and all around

Death’s toenail ship run aground

Sounds without accounting, amount mounting with each anxious

Forward step, in an empty room I hear movement’s music 

My cumin-colour muesli makes me inhuman, no more ill humour

Got bark and bite I’m the hound of Culainn

Extinguish me need pounds of coolant.