Ruins

      I, the angst-ridden protagonist,

slither up the slick, grassy slope

to the shadowless chapel ruin.

Mute tombs sprout, wriggling with carvings

contrived by the unexhumed.

Womb-like peace.

A sublime vision. God’s immune acre,

nestling into its cosy, beech-wooded coombe.

Perfumed with scents of nocturnal blooms.

The doomed cowboy outsider

wrestling in his element: the gloomy outside.

A perverted pilgrim assuming reverence,

but consumed with pride

and epicurean delight.

Penned for now within

purest Tyrian-purple twilight.

           Quite the cowboy / crusader:

spin pistols / present sword;

shoot / spear;

rejoice / lament;

think / pray;

drink / repent.

Armed at both hips

with my two large flasks unspent.

Dram-by-dram-by-dram ingestion waiting,

indulging my solipsistic bent.

One guzzle and this malcontent is ready to roll.

Creation through the five blessed sensations:

my immutable quest.

I let my invention do the rest.

Believe everything but nothing

of this damned poet's truth in his no-man's land.

           In this dusky illumination

the bloodiest bramble-vine red

and greenest bracken green

are almost as black as the soil.

Shrubs, trees and coiling vines all just

strutting shapes of finely carved obsidian.

Shredded threads of spoiled, silhouetted life

alloyed in my boiling head,

defying any human taxonomic definition.

I recoil, spooked with dread.

A dense, resonating composition

In violet, indigo and bled burgundy.

Alloyed, like a melting Rothko oil.

So alive, but also so dead.

           My third quaff thickens and

mutates the leaden atmosphere.

Misplaced tread softens my weight.

Invisible nocturnal creatures rustle, stir and rub,

desecrating the sanctuary with their quickening.

Animated undergrowth resonates

with noises redolent of the remotest jungle.

A hoot. A crackle. A flick. A snap.

The chapel air crepitates.

I switch between alternating states of fear.

The cowboy walks tall, looking at this nucleate world

from his wide, dilated eyes.

The ingrate pilgrim mutters a few chosen oaths.

Some twitchy finches flinch, then fly,

crashing blind, perforating the shrubs,

oblivious to the three fates, but aware of this fate.

I squeeze through the squeaking kissing gate.

           The lightest of breezes oozes smoothly

through the beeches and birches.

Nothing is disturbed, but

everything seems disturbed.

           My sinuses are drilled

by a keener, eye-watering wind.

Singular chilled scents batter

my overworked olfactory nerves.

An angular pain is axon hard-wired to

thrilled dog-brain dendrites.

Atoms willing atoms.

My frontal lobes dutifully distil information,

not caring that I can’t fully comprehend.

The swaggering gunslinger takes a swig,

the palmer shakes his over-pilled head,

toasting the five unskilled senses.

Smells of my invention that don’t exist

without my nasal receptors, my mucus-wet sniff.

                       ***

           I pass unnoticed.

No things care for my pallbearer creeping

in this crepuscular glow,

except the yellow one-eyed imposter planet,

reclusively laying low in the livid sky, half sleeping,

peeping at the roaming fugitive bandit

and black-sheep wayfarer.

I am fooled, but I am not fooled.

Real stars rarely grace this gloaming.

The Milky Way Kid weeps under countless dark galaxies

until his inflamed eyes turn red.

The Green Knight is destined to wander outside

in a world forever changed.

The world of the dead.

           Silent hymns, chants and anthems swell.

Phased canticles, plainsong and some distant bell.

But there is no tonal sound

in this queer, polluted ether,

just skewed, diluted susurrations.

           Then an oh-so-slight soft shift starts.

The secreted halfmoon skates

out from its cirrus camouflage.

Clouds tentatively transmute

into broken mother-of-pearl shards.

Of the million eyes that ogle this halfmoon

am I the only one that really sees its scars?

           A mineral tint lingers on the brittle air

like freshly-shucked oysters.

Lunar rays begin to attack previous facts,

curving from a shattered top-tower window,

the last clear cardinal point intact.

I drink… “To polar disintegration”

but sense, instead, some abstract integration,

so, I retract the toast,

reckoning and re-reckoning an empirical fact:

this chapel was wrecked and wracked by forces

that care little for the artifacts

of religious magnetism or compass pact.

Thoughts of mine that don’t exist

without my warm brain.

                       ***

           A crashing satellite arcs

to destruction over the bleak graveyard

where unique names, now redundant,

from olden ages, leak longingly out,

down and down, into the coombe’s cold recess.

A zephyr, or some freak phantom source,

fabricates oilless creaks.

Lifeless things speak and sing.

I am fleetingly petrified by this

repeated conjuring of the dead.

Something inexorable has been set in motion

among this astral world's antique molecules,

with no end, until humankind,

or any other form of sentient witness,

has long passed away.

           Fluid swirls of bats flutter and screak,

egressing fast down the valley from nor-nor-west.

Colonies of these web-finger wonders coalesce,

their ultrasound squeaks and weirdsome tunes

signalling solely to the unrest lost,

performing the atonal conjoining-march motif

for this dire spectral wedding of reanimated eidolons.

My soul is possessed in my underrated skin,

but best out of it.

Jaws ache from molar-grating distress.

Another testing anaesthetic is unleashed.

Both barrels! Armagnac for the hedonistic Kid.

Whisky for the sickly priest.

           The graveyard's blocks and obelisks

composed of crushed creatures long dead,

protrude from the sod like the lost crooked teeth

of some primitive race of ogres.

Grotesque symbols of conceit

trying vainly to defy man's eternal anonymity.

The moon illuminates an uncommon child's tombstone,

luring living souls to be discovered.

Some ancient genetic agency urges me

to somehow commune with it.

Four Victorian clichéd epithets

deeply etched, as if in Lucifer's own alloy

of obscure heavy metals:

cadmium, lead, beryllium and lover's arsenic.

Cerebrum fissures distend a little

as I catatonically chug-a-chug.

Glug, glug, glug goes the faux foxglove toxin.

Cherubim and seraphim serenely hover above

the interwoven ivy leaves and lilies.

Little devils watch troops of vaporous ghosts

through loveless, grey-stone eyes,

mouths fixed in puckish, cocked grimaces.

Tragic, broken-winged angels stare bewildered

at the mother-ground to which they are rooted.

Sculpted artifacts, inert,

waiting for some atavistic invocation

from some old shamanic order

to activate their reanimation.

           A colossal ancient yew stands

in monumental shadow-play.

I sense her invisible internal trunk-arcs

demarcating the centuries, occluding human time.

Moonlight caresses a curve of richer dwarf ryegrass,

the nitrogenous vestige of an old faery ring,

but faeries have long gone.

(A lone goblin left lurking in a crevice

Or under a broken arch perhaps.)

Fallen gravestones and chapel rubble are

diameter-aged by ochre lichen wreaths.

All nature’s circumferences and strict radii

reckoning the fickle aeons,

clicking and circling to her own cosmic clock.

I poke a damp, sticky rock,

but I feel a dryness that unlocks my thirst.

Materials of my making that don’t exist

without my nerves, my hands, my clammy touch.

                       ***

           The chapel is more numinous for its ruination.

Nature has reclaimed her own.

Strange seeds sprout where none was ever sown.

The makeshift pact long ago dishonoured.

Gaia sees her ravaging work,

all-conquering now and overgrown.

Uranus proudly looks on; imperious, enthroned,

primordial, alone.

Me too! … I ingest two slurps in co-celebration

And groan a bone-aching groan.

           Cobwebs straddle and bind

the fracturing cracks in the craggy walls,

yawning wider each visit, barely healed

like poorly dressed, pus-soaked wounds,

congealing on some medieval battlefield.

I guzzle, eyes peeled,

clutching my imaginary Colt revolver

and heater shield.

           Erotic snatch-like slits gape back at me.

Pouting limestone labia

longing for some evil beast to hatch.

The detached, fractured bricks spit at me.

The weakly walls submit to gravity: bowed, breached

and ruptured. Helplessly seduced.

Thick brown veins of ivy, sickly and varicose,

sign vulnerability but stabilise and patch

in a last-ditch remnant of the age-old truce.

           Few window panes remain,

speared with the unforgiving pushful gait

of maple and buddleia,

enchained to their heliotropic hankerings.

Precarious shards glisten, frighteningly bright.

Half-formed proto-gothic arches struggle out

of stout Norman foundations

overlaying something profane, more primal.

I perceive perturbing Neolithic rumblings.

So, sip another migraine-settling nip-of-the-night.

The cowboy presses on with a bumbling lurch,

scarcely upright, as decrepit now as the tower.

The plighted pilgrim tumbles in a rut

mumbling creative-zealot profanities.

I trample weird, desiccated seed-heads and rotting fruit

lying in wait for nature’s next rumble

in this dumb theatre of war.

Old tile porch-floor fragments crumble

from the upward-root stress of an alien London plane.

strayed far from its origin,

grumbling in this foreign habitat but almost native now.

A quartz streak lies flickering in the remains

like prized ambergris in the rotting corpse of a leviathan.

Everything is altered, but everything remains the same.

Sights of mine that don’t exist

without my retina, my bloodshot watery eyes.

                       ***

           A spring, hallowed since time,

gurgles and giggles to itself like an oblivious child.

How many lives baptised in your sacred water?

And what clandestine initiation rites have you hallowed

aeons ago on this antediluvian site?

I hear Sulis dribbling loud and clear and free.

To me, her night-time babblings

are like purposeful doxology.

Persistent, primaeval shocks.

Her tickling trickle pricks the onanist within.

Water oozing from her oolitic cleft,

purling over pubic moss mounds and smooth rock.

Sounds of my creation that don’t exist

without my hairy cochlea, my numbing ears.

                       ***

           A sign says DANGER KEEP OUT,

fallen from its rotting mount ages ago.

So, serves now as a general warning

to any sotted argonauts,

leaving this enchanted plot,

bracing themselves for the onslaught of

re-entering the fraught, forgotten world outside.

           The Lone Ranger remains obdurate.

The errant knight adamant,

Supping the last dregs.

Now my flasks are empty,

I am unarmed and vulnerable,

my bullets all blown.

My pilgrim’s spirit spent

wresting bent, gnomic truths.

           I roam off, back to bed, down the coombe.

A haunted revenant,

following the foaming red wave

of tormented souls in decent from the necropolis.

It’s not far in my cranial dome, or in reality,

but it is oh-so far from home.