Alchemical Reverie

2012 David Jasmin-Green

Like a startled spider you scuttled myopically into misadventure.
You have no way of knowing it for sure even now, lovely,
but you were very nearly destroyed
exploring a world you thought you knew so well.
While you were blooming, mooning, dream drooping
a bigger spider artfully smooth talked its way
into the snug, private lair of a pretty, gullible Sagittarius.

Blinking out the light earlier than planned
your virtuous bed became a torrent of blood,
a catastrophe of flowers flaccid with spent juices.
Coddled, muddled, fiddled and decapitated
by the unique splendour of the moment
your voice was laid as bare as your naked body,
and to his surprise it was as sweet and musical
as a mountain brook bubbling over algae covered rocks.
You were slightly paranoid, marginally suspicious, maybe,
but nevertheless you were largely oblivious
to his cunningly camouflaged misintentions,
you were blinded by his prowess with his chosen weapon
and his unparalleled mastery of cunnilingus.

So what went wrong with the raptor's wicked plan?
I'll tell you. He spared you because your bountiful breasts
were as soft as a young girl's thighs.
The honey-dewed leafy parasols of sticky Sycamore
nodded above your heads the following morning
as the two of you lay blissfully in a distant meadow
lazily soaking up the sunshine
while little dicky-birds snickered in the branches
over too many sweet nothings to count.
The sentient machine inside your head wondered
about your man's subtle, almost imperceptible change.
It was a miracle perhaps, you thought,
a multicoloured celestial blessing,
a paradigm of God given brightness,
or maybe just another carefully plotted tissue of lies
that you would repent at leisure.

Oh silk! Soft as cans of worms are soft,
soft and wet, so very, very wet.
You warmed his numb, world weary flesh, my dear,
and the gentle touch of your satin skin destroyed
all of his scaly promises to self of fallacy,
every last one.
You washed his nefariousness away
like the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.

Verily, at first the light of the moon could not be seen
in the deeply shadowed dustbin of his mind,
in the hollow, echoing bone cavern
where an astonishing assortment of dross gathered,
wishes made fat by greed, a perilous place
where so much white, innocent silk
has been soiled irreversibly over the years.
Gradually, though, the white lion
lost its precocious virginity.
You and your innocent love, my dear,
were dirtied and then made clean
in the vampire's formerly muddy inner waters,
waters that have witnessed many more secrets than you or I.

And now, in the milky cloud of his worship
for you and only you I sense
a luminescence seldom seen, a delicacy rarely tasted
and almost never known completely.
The lighter part of his rapacious being
that remained after processing
rose and fluffed up harmlessly like dough rises
in the best possible conditions.
Here now, look, is fertile soil, red earth glorious
and tranquil waters turquoise and still.
Temporary oceans hang impossibly
in the bird egg blue canopy of the sky,
indefinite translucent reservoirs of being
where you and your rehabilitated ogre can swim languidly
without the slightest risk of interruption
for as long as you damned well like.
Ten out of ten for taming the tiger.