The Man from Mandrax

The Man from Mandrax

Mandrax seed in a dead man’s coat, I stalk the floodplain until recently held to be a Venetian phenomenon. Crackling seals re-perform my crime for random passerby in drastic madams’ elastic tokens. Gone. Another flat-ended puddle of flax: liminal, pointing eastward. Signed, sealed, delivered. I’m disguised as a junkie of old—they stare at me outside of the soup kitchen. It rains still and, huddled in niches, the snails emerge towards their hallowed wine and tobacco hollows. One toke, one toke—only a motion away.

At a hiccup’s pace, not necessarily stoned, butt-ended avalanche of water, or waiting, of wine and sandbags. Dramamine helps one to lean with the city’s rocking gait. An oasis palmed in plaid, deflated, then drowned, newly navigable as carburetors cough up blood and conk out. In that, another deed indeed gets done.

The sun may never shine again, undone as Newflorence’s Renzi's-pavement’s laced with mercury, a mirror to the falling water, upward in a twin so thin against hidden stones and sea-ment, no seed to take over mortar, no earth beneath our feet, only moons, a mutually attracted collaborator to the weight, an image in the sky of the night we exiled electronically orange, crucifying all good intentions for the season ‘tis for regretting the folly of poverty with all them gifts.

But quit? It don’t seem likely—not in a text anyway, a mandate for decent proceeding onto the next hanged man giving birth to worlds of poisonous offspring in stolen coats who never look back but only forward to vengeful revolutions.

11/28-9/2012

Florence and Bologna