Alchemisland

The ne’er rising sun

Plunging from azure-plundered skies

The busy pilums of the Thunderer strike

Cries like wolfrhapsody as climbing fires reach the highest cathedral spires

Liars esteemed 

From hissing oceans clear pearls of escaping steam

In fitful sleep and frightening waking dreams, visions of children screaming

Crowds streaming through fissures in the palisades

Schemers blatant, kingears harking to what they say

Green given to grey, fields unto graves, faces pale

Around healing houses lofty railings raised, barring the saved

And only the cur and beaten slave live unchanged in this changing age

The wheel broken, shattered spokes like thief-hungry staves

In some dismal, driedbloodcobble courtyard in old Wallachia

Warnings from deeper time, in Greek and in Latin

Little warding these walls against such waves, cities flattened

A sound from the sky, like the threnodies of whales

No more the Trinity are hailed, prayer failed

Hearts impaled, endless cedartoppling gales regaling

Humanity with dirges of old excess, to better impress

Unwanted lessons, legs blessed with lesions

Cruel legions in allegiance to crueller demons

Statues heavenblue bleeding tears

Order bowed to chaos, the ending of tiers

Culling of sons, coming of false wonders

Gold plated with undersides sundered

Prophets and preachers mere mummers

Before boiling, smoke-belching tophets, wailing mothers

Withered teats, ichor-leaking udders, wombs like tombs

Us alone, and no others

No more caps of liberty atop the heads of libertine Phrygians

No more revelations, no more revelries

No more rivalries, and no more nations

No more cross stations, no more elevated places

For the oceans have raised to displace us, as in ancient day

When the ringed city drank by waves cascaded in one day’s occupation

No more saviours, overgrown paths peopled by bandits and rapists

Grief-maddened citizens rave on street corners

Ravens calling out to each other in coarse communion

Due course of all things, hidden dark’s exhumation

Mavens once maidens now insane o’er unlimed pit graves

No one saved, no more paved roads to pale havens

The pale listener, wan light from His willowisp lantern whipped

By winds, and the winding toys which light the night frightened

From brightness, and all worldly whiteness turns red

Like flesh rent by rabid biting, and uninviting ice

And calls to bravery suddenly unenticing

All the knights, their courage denied

And all the skies sore with trining lightning

And all books and words of enlightenment

Piled to rot in damp like praties full of blighted

Potatoes, and all would-be heroes lay low

And the sky drink-palsied yellow in Rebellion’s afterglow

Lost lustre and ice glistening

Soft mutters, Charon-bound coins from eyes lifted

And great rifts, great pyres as sprout from Ifrit erase history

And from razed places, shorn of mystery, denied skin

Rough thornspawn, twisted like great triffids 

Indifference in thronerooms, diffidence in the peerage

A rot harboured deep in bones looms, blooming with each new

Trumpet scorn, scores of shorn Samsons

Blameless bloated seekers clogging shores

More than three days He lies in stone tomb

Goliath triumphant, Babylon’s rule, O day rued

Cruel, godfletched arrows flew, cruised like bloodnosed owls

Toward some oaknibbling folkwhisper

Sword lifted lands, separating ear from listener

Hearing missed dearly, stealing mists and all unclearly

As peering through soul-stuffed crystal during gypsy readings

Nearness far-seeming and pained, age-stooped grace disappearing.