Alchemisland

When you’re in love, it can be look started

Silk surplus curtains back peeled, parting. Looks darting.

Revealing a jewelled stag and a diamond-mouthed pine marten.

Horned me. Dark, darkest and stormy

Inside the door, a worm-eaten portal.

Vermeer this sky, a fatal bride. Neither safety nor bridle. Nothing confided

By that unbright Titan’s silent malachite marbling. Vorpal. The abnormal.

The floor warped, heel-scored. Scorched chequerboard.

Gorse. Redder sword. Nothing former about my forming glories.

Nothing normal about my stories, yet on she implores me; explores me.

Courts me, escorts me. Two jewel addicts, fuelling our madding antics

Dual; Janus. Antlered. Lathered madness.

Imperial planets, set dancing by a hand of gladness

Fantasy maps, gaunt-pranced castle battlements

Dawn’s pranking dazzlement

Dorian Gray’s visage collapsing on bleak, streaked once-handsome canvas

A weeping strand. Lesions bleeding

Allegiance weaning.

Waning the aching mage-scanned pages of the moon’s face

Hanged upon nothingness to amaze man to revery. Maize-spanned

The gigantic palace and its surrounding lands.

Cool to touch, my hands upon a bust

Of Pallas raven-abutted.

Lust’s ne’er-full chalice. A hulking thing seeks balance, ballast.

The heir apparent of tale and ballad.

The hegemony is fatally challenged.

Love entrusts. A slumped’s blood crusts. Encrusted

Russet gusset. Relics, Etruscan

Bullrushes. Tauroctony, bulls gushing.