Alchemisland

What happens after

Last drink we both knew we shouldn’t have

Master and slave, neither knowing their place

Stately chief in eider sleeve sweeping a fireplace

While his ragged slave remains abed, postured as if dead on the chaise

Daily Saturnalia; contorting, transforming, changing, this fluxsome pace

The age of remakes, reforming what our lab warming unmakes:

The meaning of the bird, the wisdom of the drake, the snake’s name,

The End’s date encoded in the pyramid slates, older than old.

The beach is the athanor, ineluctable modes;

Those about which Joyce told us

In a book more often thrown than read, yet he is throned

And when we clear our noses away from the nosegay, it is his ocean

We think of, we are his creations

It’s safe to say that part and parcel

Of this artless city be comprised solely of his notions.

Souls like waves in motion, still for a time

Breaking into waves of rhyme

Digging, hoping it’s still there. I haven’t seen it in some time

But there it is, where I left it, deep in the cleft

The ground where Mother Mary had wept rimed and hard as my left

The hardy ground had no give, like a steel bar

Already, the pill-emboldened sun had its jagged shiv displayed

And was planting seeds of scars on Night’s muscular carapace

Will this one be the making or breaking of my already-aching knees

Hatter-mad

One doing what the other says, imbalances

One obeys, the other continually repeats that he paid for this place

Without him she wouldn’t have it, implying complaint should not

Cannot be made habit.