Mandrake

Mandrake is a bad man. A man known for learning sewing
So as to fix up babies in sealskin
And send them oceanbottom.
Suckers for a ransom,
Their parents only knew in nightmares the dreamlife
Beneath the waves, where jellyfish glow red
And monstrous fish hide among the shadows of the larger whales.

The hours never reaching dawn
He sits alone in flannel nursing a lovingly repulsed craving
For a small cigar.
There will be no smoking here. Not a single, pleasurable puff.

Below, his mother knocks upon the ceiling.
“Mandrake, turn down that foul bass.
It interrupts my shows!”

He’s listening to Verdi
And his eyes are filled with tears.
“Mandrake! It's time for bed!”
His eyes are filled with tears, and they are cracked, raw, and red.

The nearby woods are filled with ghosts.
They come a welcome sight
Like lanterns on a darkening street.
He finds his plots by their reflections in the pond
And, even in death, they keep their space
And let him pass
Mumbling and reckoning their retribution
But only waiting.
He keeps a bottle hid behind the books on his bedstead –
A Bible, the Gita, and the Field Guide to Birds –
Filled with clear fire, with the loss of memories
And the gentle shores of distant sleep.
Perhaps tonight, he’ll fall away.

The young are calling out to him
In voices empty of forgiveness or anger
In those hours when he tosses and seeks to turn
Another day to night.
To find a little quiet,
They speak to him only of their presence
In their outlying hold upon the words of the living.
Of their unalterable spirits rising up daily
And breathing stains upon the window pains
And casting viral dust upon the floor.

In all this, he sleeps.
Only when the hot drink has pulled him there
And no further,
Not to the place of horned toads and belly rot
But to the finely balanced spot
On a seacraft: at bed on the pull of the lapping tides.

And there his victims call out below.
And there we too will go.
Just a curse we’re left with.
But will we go with him?
Mandrake thinks of all his little children dead and gone
And he lets go a storm
Enough to people a blue girl’s face
With tears and his rank come.
He gets this way when angry:
And his anger grows in widening fields.
They never trust him, those girls.
So fuck them in the end.

But it all sleeps
This madness, too,
And final memories haunting longer than final pains
All of us passing
Dragged down with subtle force
Or in the grip of motherly jaws
We might sleep tonight, Mandrake or we,
And let our heads crack with majesty
Letting pearls of cackling voices tell
Of children buried dead and gone.
Of little boys in spit shined hair
Who wander out from lightning-illumined woods
And, with their glow worms held like baby pink sisters,
Stoke the lines of signal fires
Guiding futures we were promised would appear.