Alchemisland

Addicted to decoding old pictures since he stopped smoking swishers

Acquired alone the second volume of seven secret codices of wickedness

Known since Rome, when they were old already

Characters etched into stone with fingermashing effort

Transcribed by blind scribes

Who never saw those books’ crooked gifts described

Their script that of Ancient Greece

In places the spoken-Aramaic of Joseph of Arimathea seen

And look what he’s been able to summon, once locked-up

These cough up and colour your coffers and coppers cookbooks

Teaspoons of fortune-fashioning roots imbued with Neptunian aspects

Inside a jar, gaoled in grim green aspic an homunculus

Though hugging its knees, visage plainly seen as maintaining

Aspects of its maker’s face

Fate given and the one we make

Creation’s basement a place abased, in sordid unsorry disarray

Learned swine bespectacled, with tweezers and all ManFall wine drunk

Synthesising pearls and other sty unguents in a skyless, striated stygian.