Ruined Chapel – Twilight and Night - November Walk – Solipsistic Contradictions.

I, the angst-ridden protagonist, slither up

To the shadowless chapel ruin.

A sublime sight. God’s acre

Nestling into its cosy beech-wooded coombe.

A perverted pilgrim in reverence, but not in awe.

Penned for now within

Purest Tyrian-purple twilight.

Quite the clichéd cowboy / crusader:

Spin pistols / draw swords;

Shoot / spear; think / pray; drink / repent.

Armed at both hips

With my two large flasks unspent.

Dram-by-dram-by-dram ingestion

Indulging my solipsistic bent.

One strong guzzle and I’m ready to roll.

Creation through sensation.

My immutable quest.

I let my imagination do the rest.

The reddest bramble-vine-red

Is almost as black as the soil.

Plants, shrubs, trees all just

Strutting shapes in my head.

A spooky intensity, I recoil.

A dense resonating composition

In violet, indigo and burgundy.

Boiling, like a melting Rothko oil.

So alive, but also dead.

My third quaff thickens and mutates the atmosphere.

Invisible nocturnal creatures rustle, stir and rub.

Animated undergrowth resonates.

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

The chapel air crepitates.

Some twitchy finch flinches

Crashing blind into the shrubs

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

The lightest of breezes oozes

Through the beeches and birches.

Nothing is disturbed, but everything seems disturbed.

My sinuses are drilled by a keener eye-watering air.

Singular chilled scents batter

My overworked olfactory nerves.

An angular pain is axon-hard-wired to

Dog-brain dendrites.

Meanwhile my frontal lobes slowly digest information,

Trying to understand, I don’t comprehend tonight.

The gun-slinger takes a swig again,

Toasting the five senses.

Smells of my invention that don’t exist

Without my nasal receptors, my wet sniff.

I pass unnoticed. No thing cares for my creeping

Except the yellow one-eyed imposter-planet.

Reclusively laying low in the livid sky half-sleeping.

I am fooled, but I am not fooled.

No stars grace this gloaming.

Then an oh-so-slight soft-shift starts.

Silent hymns, chants and anthems swell around,

But there is no sound.

The secreted moon slowly slides

Out from its cirrus camouflage.

Clouds tentatively transmute

To broken mother-of-pearl shards.

A mineral tint is on the air like freshly-shucked oysters.

Lunar rays begin assaulting previous fact,

Slightly bending from a shattered top-tower window,

The last clear cardinal point intact.

I drink… “To polar disintegration”,

But sense integration, then retract, reckoning.

This chapel was wrecked by wracked forces

That care little for religious magnetism or compass.

Thoughts of mine that don’t exist

Without my invention, my warm brain.

A crashing satellite arcs to destruction over the graveyard

Where names from other ages seep longingly out,

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

A wind or some phantom source fabricates oilless creaks.

I am fleetingly petrified by this

Repeated conjuring of the dead.

Fluid swirls of bats flutter down the valley from the west.

A colony of webbed-wonders

Signalled solely to the unrest lost

By their ultrasound-squeaks and weirdsome tunes.

Performing the conjoining-march motif

For this dread spectral wedding.

My jaw aches from teeth-grinding.

I am in my underrated skin, but out of it.

Another large anaesthetic is in order; both barrels.

The moon illuminates a tombstone

Commanding my curiosity.

Four long Victorian epithets

Deeply etched as if in an alloy

Of obscure toxic heavy metals:

Cadmium, lead, beryllium and arsenic.

Cerebrum fissures dissolve a little as I chug.

Cherubim and seraphim float

Over the interwoven leaves and petals.

A colossal ancient yew stands

Silhouetted and monumental,

I sense her invisible internal trunk-arcs

Demarcating the centuries,

Occluding human time.

Moonlight caresses a curve of richer dwarf rye-grass,

The nitrogenous vestige of an old faery ring,

But faeries have long gone.

A lone goblin lurking in a crevice

Or under a broken arch perhaps.

On fallen gravestones and chapel rubble

Lichen rings diameter-age.

All nature’s circumferences and radii

Reckoning the aeons,

Clicking and circling to her own cosmic clock.

I poke the damp rock,

But I feel a dryness that whets 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 were sown.

The fragile make-piece pact long-ago dishonoured.

Gaia sees her ravaging work,

All conquering now and overgrown.

Uranus proudly looks on; imperious,

Primordial and alone.

Me too! … I ingest another slurp in co-celebration.

Cobwebs straddle and bind

The creeping cracks in the rubble walls

Yawning wider each visit

Like poorly dressed pus-soaked wounds,

Contained discharges on some battlefield.

I guzzle.

The cunt-like slits gape at me.

Limestone labia pout.

The busted brick spits at me.

The weakly walls are bowed and breached,

Fractured and ruptured.

Thick brown veins of ivy, sickly and varicose,

Sign vulnerability but stabilise and bind

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

The few windows left are speared

With the unforgiving pushful gait of maple and buddleia.

Bound to their heliotropic hankerings.

Precarious shards glisten, frighteningly bright.

Half-formed proto-gothic arches struggle out

Of stout Norman foundations

Overlaying something older, more primal.

I subtly perceive faint Neolithic vibrations.

I sip another nip-of-the-night.

I bumble on with a slight lurch, as decrepit as the tower.

I stumble in a rut and mumble a zealot’s profanities.

I trample weird desiccated seed-heads and rotting fruit

Lying in wait for nature’s next rumble

In this theatre of war.

Old tile porch-floor fragments crumble

From the upward root-stress of an alien London Plane.

Strayed far from its source, but almost native now.

Everything is altered, but 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 back on this arcane antediluvian site?

But I hear Sulis dribbling loud and clear and free.

To me her night-time babblings are purposeful,

Persistent, primeval.

Her tickling trickle pricks the onanist me.

Water oozing from her oolitic cleft.

Sounds of my creation that don’t exist

Without my hairy cochlea, my numbing ears.

The lone-ranger remains obdurate,

Sipping and supping the last dregs left.

Now my flasks are empty,

I am unarmed and vulnerable,

My bullets all blown. My pilgrim’s spirit spent.

I head off home down the coombe

Following the departed souls

From the necropolis.

It’s not far in my mind, or in reality,

But it is so far from home.