the alchemist

encrypted alchemies
break apart on the surface
of obscure and elemental names
like the symptoms of a patient's
malady

a patient who is fighting his memories
attempting to repel the ghosts
that haunt his dreams
paper tombstones aflame
under the diminishing moonlight
& a prayer for apathy
in the face of an unforgiving
sympathy

his medicine will be forgetting
everything he is and was
a self-portrait by a deranged
impressionist stolen and left
in the gutter of his empathy

someone will say: it looks like a death mask
& then they will look away

to reduce and to confine
because alchemy is art and science
method acting and revisionism
fighting against people
who are fighting themselves
inarticulate, their voices carry
in the wind of their forgetting