One Can Die Of Strangeness Poem by Ripper Jones

The new escape for Victorian modernism
Kubla Khan written in Arabian twirls
Automata dangerously real
As the clockwork creaks and strains
To give out the call to duty
Of a hundred Bazalgettes and improving men
Straddled on wondrous steam trains
Monsters of the new age breathing fire
On Byron's Greece reaffirmed
As white statues gain their colour
And the slaves arise to humanity
Their unspoken lives live on
In the fantastical moment
Of surprising ancient anecdote
Scrawled on walls of toil
With allegorical blood washed down
With wine from the black cask of history.

Knights of old crashing down
In military catastrophe
Unable to see the grass from the sky
In Kaleidoscopes of chivalric colour
Unknown in the real world
Of dreams journeying
Through the poet's soul
Unerring, unbending
Leading inexorably but inexplicably
To the premises of metaphysical reality
Where a step outside time
Is a step in the direction of matter
That coagulates a
And gives us a sort of reality
Divorced from Saturnalian dread
Of the devil's ecstasy
Here on Earth.