Alchemisland

Up here in the peaks one hears a hidden third man’s speech

Reaches repeating seemingly, each yeeting eagerly into the sky

Like mirrored trees or crystal keeps in gothic sweep, upward

Screeching even eagles fear nesting here, this queer

Austere clime, inclement climate uninterrupted

The pedant says aloud that he smells trouble ahead

The same thought in every man’s mind and chest, in his pen

When he scribbles at the desk of the legs, behind the mesh

On the slippery, silverine edge of the westmost west

A horrible demon speaks at length of long defeat

Feet heavy with clinging sleet blacken to peat

Keeping step becomes an endurance test

The unready met with death, bigger questions

Lending a dying man a flask, one last moment then alas

Onward must go, through hail rain sleet and snow

To see our globe as a crow might, and feel mighty

Might long denied we, be by this sight deified

Nothing else will satisfy, my ambition is not saving a life

So my friend, I say goodbye; he watches me climb

The world’s spine until I am a smudge, a diminutive line

Far as a lime to an ant, quicklime dyed snow divides

The group, connected by thick binds we maintain sightlines

The climber at line’s back, already flagging, injures his leg and cannot climb

He begins to cause a lagging behind, his wire is severed

We cannot say whose knife, word given that night of pledged silence

He plunged with avian violence through a whitestrobing void, pilotless

Flight arms wide as his knowing eyes, deriding decided fate

No climbing, he’ll miss these sliding slopes white as an Irishman’s elbow

Words flee his speaking piece but wind haunting that lee slope elopes with it, his last hopes

Passed over like worst in class before a five aside match, avoid playing red ass

Last rations wolfed down

Haranguing famine begins the self’s slow bog drowning, bogged down beleaguered

From the passes a thick tear gas fog descends, occluding senses

Shells of former selves, shadows shambling endless

Slower than ambling speed, rambling group once-gleeful now needful

We imagine greedy portions of steam-shedding roast beef

Promising ourselves this trip will have no sequel, we’ll stick to sledding

We are all pig sick with consistently ingesting dead flesh, hacking phlegm

And yet

Snowblasted and snowblind, mad bastards insist on continuing the climb

Divine soon we’ll have to eat the first to die of wounds, no prison room

For our group, we’ll do what we have to do, no one will communicate it

We commune about imminent cannibalism, is man an animal

Or higher even than heaven’s anpiels, winter and cold are malevolent

As they are old, hell not skysent

Easyblister flesh, gristle of leg boiled to bending point, tasted like pork

Chops, chopped a body into executable portions, Porthos the esculent

Manna decidedly unheavensent, we’d be despised in the levant for heathenry

Portents more each portion of manflesh, once abhorrent gore

With time, meal origins become less important

We excise cuts from the ruinous forms of succumbed men

Suck on them, innervating flagging humors

Fortifying against rumours of frigid, brumal death

Cold chews us, we chew our old friends, rusty bones and rustier blood

Frozen mud, nowhere to hide our indulgences.