Alchemisland

In fitful sleep and frightening waking dreams

Visions of children screaming

Crowds streaming through fissures in palisades

King ears bent to hear what blatant schemers say

Green given to grey, fields unto graves

Around healing houses lofty railings raised, barring the saved

Only curs and beaten slaves live unchanged in this changing age

The wheel’s 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 walls against such waves, cities flattened

A sound from the sky, like the threnodies of whales

No more the Trinity are hailed, prayers have failed

Hearts impaled, endless cedar-toppling 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

The prophets, preachers, mere mummers

And 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-madenned citizens rave on street corners

The ravens calling out to each other in coarse communion

The due course of all things, the hidden dark’s exhumion

The mavens once maidens now insane o’er unlimed pit graves

No one is saved, no more paved roads to pale havens

The pale listener, the wan light of his willowisp lantern whipped

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

From brightness, and all the world’s whiteness turns to red

As of flesh rent by rabid biting, and the uninviting ice

And the call to bravery suddenly so unenticing

All the knights, their courage denied, and all the skies sore with trining lightning

And all the books and the words of the enlightenment

Are piled to rot in damp like praties full of blighted

Potatoes, and all the would-be heroes lay low

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

The lost lustre and the ice glistening

The soft mutters, Charon-bound coins from eyes lifted

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

And from the 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 the bones looms, blooming with each new

Trumpet scorn, scores of shorn Samsons

Blameless bloated seekers clog ruined shores

More than three days he lieth in the stone tomb

Goliath triumphant, Babylon’s rule, the day rued

Cruel, godfletched arrows flew and cruised like bloodnosed owls

Toward some oaknibbling folkwhisper

The sword lifted lands, separating ear from listener

Hearing missed dearly, a stealing mist and all unclearly

As though peering through a soul-stuffed crystal during a gypsy’s reading.