Like marked chapters
In a secondhand book’s cooked brown pages
The villages ruined, hamlets razed
Places they came
Their wagon train came this way
The speaker dehorsed steadies his bay
Reeling at scented decay
Where bodies were hauled to be limed
Mud marked with stark Nazca lines
Like the triumphal parade of a cast snake
Dragging ardour in trenchcutting wake
Bleak matchstick maze
Remade land’s lay
Suffocating air makes passers cough
From the copse to the coffin
A staying scent
Lazy feelings preceding death
Even after the fierce blaze
Without matted canopies
The restless element ate
The swollen boughs are massive
Stocky as dodgy club doormen stopping hassle
A feeling of something sleeping, dormant
Dreaming deeply of sap-weeping spring
Misshapen cults of oddly-named fungi
Produce from sodden, moss-wearing logs
Like the rotten swirls of settling sebum
That seep evilly from bumps squeezed
Alchemisland 
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