Alchemisland

At the sight of your tired writhing My capsized heart writhes alive Love enprides my foetid breast My cat’s head tilting, at rest Like a stressless feline dressed in gold Stretched leisurely on Bastet’s temple steps, of old; Of all guileful felines, you I hight best

A looming light-spewing moon Like one of Molly Malone’s freckled boobs  Loosed from tube, displayed, on view,  By means of a carriage’s movement

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…