Alchemisland

I am the rust-jammed hatch things vanish casually into.

Matte blackness I am that.

Roaring stag, abhorring all practice unlordly;

Sword unsheathing a resort only for

When foes mean to stab the impertinent, mismanaged slab

Of my sagging collaborative flesh like day labouring Keats.

*

Replies by ripple this dirty nail paint’d

Grit-flavoured water, stagnant and staid as a cripple

The winds required to whip those waters to war-toward order

Sat sacked inside His impossible daughter’s unmarauded gizzard.

Ilium’s sack seemed worthwhile in lieu of the poems written off its back.

*

Time-spiting backwardness. A kind of biteback beckoning.

I am that I am that is not; a causal anomaly

I cannot yet do exist. Do not exist yet?

Persistence all everyweather, and gall.

The stubbornest blister ever.

*

Awls prick me when I try sitting

So I live my life either screaming or sprinting.

Owls lift me when I begin wilting,

So I live half my life at the tops of high buildings.

*

As I read aloud my caustic homilies, the audience steels

Like chaste maidens bracing vomit-breeding platemail kisses

From thought-missing crusaders, who, visiting Christian stable,

Came away committed to sabler, goat-faced, Mendesian ways.

*

Rewinding time so that I might

Linger longer on rhyming songful moments.

To stay a while, to fill a line whose clumsy end I’ll file off in the end.

That Paddy bloke doesn’t half fancy himself Ireland’s Philo.

Did you catch any of what he wrote? Vile vanity that cache.