Alchemisland

I don’t leak easily, sleek supertanker teasing steel brassiere

I’m no ill-made beaker-tankard, contents escaping eagerly

My blood harder acquired than booze during prohibition

When parched far from a speakeasy or poitín still once on every hill.

Unlike giving butter all evening out of fridge,

Gilding the small bed of the bread slice,

I do not spread evenly, a picky plague agues a city

Pox apothecaries loathe

As it dawns, disease’s coming on, crownedbrows sport spots

Like jungle cats, implacid panthers – before gats, man’s anathema –

Or a teenager’s furrowing range, raging with slurry-spreading acne

I do not speak cleanly 

Feeling everything so keenly

Forced me to fit locks on empathy’s box; cage of someone else’s rage

Seething in my wellsprings, for my wellbeing squash it, zucchini;

That a baby marrow or a meme with a red arrow

Pointing out Mark Zuckerberg’s summer budgie smugglers?