Alchemisland

Apollo and python 

A sporting lord

And wielded change and lightning chains

Who enjoyed cavorting with human sorts 

Despite his wife’s jealous, green-tinged eyes blazing

Queenly Athena, shed no fierce tears at your frieze’s fleecing

Turn your molten heart freezing and curse the disruptor’s penis

Cast shadows where the shoulder-stroking light of Venus lends warm feeling

Upon the world’s ceiling, inscribe vistas of revealing

Revolting scenes of revolving wheels, of far flung icy seas and skin peeling

And bouts of harsh, eyepopping disease

Frequent ingestion of food o’er piquant

Boreas watching us, send hammerblow breezes to set seas seizing

Like Caesar fitting, a divine disease, and a punishment befitting a villainous

Indigent on an indecent mission. Toes he should have kissed in submission

He submerged in padded tissue and held in wooden prisons

Art is the prism which christens beauty, unleashing be its duty

All glory and booty of refracted fruit: eye and mind and light

Like wombs; now tombs, beneath Albion’s 70-room dunes

With purloined goods strewn, never to be exhumed

Let these cast runes quicken ruinous winds, send them soon and zooming

Send them booming, send them in pursuit

Send men in suits who, forsooth,

Would have made fine myrmidon troops, given room and duty

Let Zeus tear up Elgin’s lands roots, those planted by his own hand

Let rigid, immovable boundaries be set, that he no more expands

His demesne; drain away his lakes and leave a basin dry as sand

Send Egyptian Set to this place instead, which you left so stands

Deservedly bereft, languishing

Let Elgin’s clod be cleft for seekers from Hell

Let Elgin’s egg bonce be below every roof tile which falls or fell

Let chaos constant and monstrous, hail and wail, without pretense

Let him pray, let him see his failure, his life’s newfound railings

Let him seek recompense, let him these dire crimes recollect

Let our notions in his head be connected and sprout legs

Let his portion be the dregs, just the foamy, drinkless head again

Offer no protection to this predator, worm his bread and turn his head

To sordid sights which vengeful knights arranged upon the night

Let nothing armour him from these harmful ardours, neither mail nor neck charm

Balm or calm the constant spine-trampling; let him search to no avail

Finding no help available, and no rest beyond the veil

Should he self-impale upon those newly uprighted railings marking his jailing

Let vile incurable sores beset him, agony force him to floor on all fours

Let weep the Christ petrol from his bored paws

Let seep the green sap from his thrice-infected jaws

Let Set send all the agues, lurgies and poxes of his dread heaven

Let the spine of Elgin be bent or severed

Let his friends and prelates be enveloped with jealousy

And run like leverets before an hungry owl’s malevolence into that green sea

Let this world’s worst fates betray him, epoxy to him all things alien

That he might know and disdain a foreign traitor’s raping

Let all his light be draped and taken away like a child finished play

Let him see reflected the error of his ways in these taxing labours

Let his neighbours be quite taken with his decorations

Their new Grecian flavour; in fact, have them visit him wielding sabres

To liberate and save the Parthenon bodies and return them where they came from

Let able-bodied mobs with hanging ropes come thronging, eager to flog him

Hermes in winged boots and quickening cape, what imps can you ape this day

Make permeable the solid walls of Elgin’s life, make this change permanent

In bronze chains ensconce this blithe termagant, have his worm turn

Have him reduced to steaming puce ashes, fit for an urn

Ravage him savagely, his back rancid where the lash landed

For all his cash, for the great works lining his vast landing

Let him be utterly thankless, sporting wounds one cannot bandage

A feeling one cannot vanquish of being sandwiched between hard places

Let nights of cards and succession rites and works of art be taken away

Subtract his means and dry his gravy, drive him crazy unto the grave

For his great and ill-considered desecration of a lost world’s resting place

Let him see, as through a glass darkly, a hail-like haze

Let his own mind be a mystery maze, let him see only haunting shapes

Never the clarity of the face, nor of the place he disgraced

Where his head lay, let that x-marked space be a serpent’s basin

Let him lose all his servants, this purpose-built fervent freemason

Henceforth, let pass no moment when his hands are not clammy

Let him shake and rave and babble for all the damage.