Blockbusters

For what might break a writer’s block that grips

my pen as if King Arthur’s sword, I quest

through bookshops of My Lady Charity

in Urbs Leodiensis Mystica,

completely outside Freeman’s (as most) worlds,

where locals speak blank verse (says Harrison);

Back-to-Front Inside-Out Upside-Down Leeds,

according to the Nuttgens book I bagged

along with authors promising keys to open

secrets of iambic pentameter,

how it’s a ball and chain, a waltz — but best,

in Žižek’s wind sock for the New World Order,

Gnostic code imprinted by five feet

that lead us to a Grail Brown liquefies

as Shakespeare melts to decasyllabics

like congealed saint’s blood in a Naples shrine.

Brown quotes from Philip’s Gospel where it suits

to build on Rosslyn Chapel’s premises

vast hypophetic labyrinths in the air

yet blind to masons’ mysteries below,

who carved among the seven virtues greed

with charity being made a deadly sin    ...    

The world was made in error, Philip wrote — 

Savonarola, in The Rule of Four

(another blockbuster from Oxfam’s shelves)

is made to quote “the Gospel of Paul” — 

does error here disguise some secret truth?

What if  Paul’s Gospel were real, a Gnostic text

thrown on the Bonfire of the Vanities

so seen there by our zealot’s burning eyes,

its road map to the true Grail turning to ash?

My back-to-back looks on a blind man’s road

to Wilfred’s city, where he came from Rome

to blitz our monks for “Simon Magus” tonsures

after that Gnostic heresiarch

a dog denounces in St. Peter’s Acts,

while Peter raised smoked tuna from the dead,

explained his crucifixion upside down,

then how God’s Kingdom might be found on Earth:

quite suddenly, like Paul I saw the light

through Peter’s apophatic paradox,

my block was my von Eschenbach stone grail,

freeing my pen like Arthur’s sword to write

this poem backwards, as Da Vinci might.