Alchemisland

Rivers the colour of energy drink  Self-replenishing disease delivery systems All manner of enervating agues Aches, ailments, mayhem-causing lurgies In menacing ringfenced factories Hooded peons ply blighting mancies  They triumph in plastic fantasy  In the uncanny valley duality of facsimile  Learning the ritual value Of witch-valued simulacrum  Overhead a drubbed sky draped In vague, hinted…

Cold that pains the cheeks  My creaking knees croak easterly breeze Dreams tease Feigning ease of achievement Here, in flame-embattled forest  Pyres ate the petalled, chagrinning florists This horrid world curdles the florid  Words my quill hurls hopefully We followed that trail of ruination  We did not stay long, or ruminate  Upon the insensate devastation …

Like marked chapters  In a secondhand book’s cooked brown pages The villages ruined, hamlets razed Places they came  Their wagon train came this way The speaker dehorsed steadies his bay Reeling at scented decay Where bodies were hauled to be limed Mud marked with stark Nazca lines Like the triumphal parade of a cast snake…

The sea’s heaving breast  The spread compass shadow  Passing beneath the statue’s legs  Belief is beggared The Colossus shocks with breadth Rocks heavy with wrecks beg caress  The foot-swept deck wet Sleek and hope-pregnant yet  The swan sweep of that vessel, going west All the whizzbang barracuda-toothed cogs  Marking this machinous, rustbleak century Like dog-eared…

Damaged sky everycolour Buttery and smudged  Fudged utterly Hues so lovely Pastels so eye-floodingly wondrous  Could only signal some end’s beginning Night frightening and bright  Night, a lid, shattered Like a glass tortoise sent warward Revealing the home of the law  In broad, raw technicolour Like a hawaiian shirt some fat cop wore Red flaring…