The Mariner’s Bleached Horizon

Three ages past, the storm’s devouring tongue
Had claimed his crew, their ballads left unsung.
The ship, a carcass gnawed by starless deep,
Now haunts his dreams when phantom waters weep.
But here, in this expanse of bone-drowned light,
The sea and sand conspire to blur the night.

**I**
First came the thirst—a rasping, hollow hymn
That peeled his throat like tides stripping a limb.
He licked the air for promises of rain,
Found only dust where memories of main
Once danced in ropes and rigging’s taut embrace.
His hands, now claws, still mimic knots’ sly grace.

**II**
By day, the sun—a tyrant’s molten crown—
Pours liquid lead to drown his reason down.
By night, the dunes exhale their frozen breath,
And frost ethes lies of harbors beyond death.
He names the stars “Old Currents,” charts their flow,
Yet finds no course through wastelands’ spectral glow.

**III**
Then—vision! There! Where heat’s gold teeth devour,
A mastless schooner rides the mirage hour.
Her sails are woven from his daughter’s hair,
Her hull still bears the barnacle-wounds bare
From when she kissed the coral’s crimson blade.
He stumbles, laughs, weeps curses at the shade.

**IV**
“Fair Phantom!” cries his voice, a rusted chain,
“What port awaits beyond this mercury plain?
My Margaret waits where lilac cliffs stand tall—
Does she yet pace the widow’s windward wall?”
The ship dissolves to mercury and glare,
Leaves him to choke on hope’s narcotic air.

**V**
Now madness comes—a siren less unkind
Than truth’s sharp keel plowing the mind’s decline.
He converses with conchs, their spiral throats
Humming blue dirges from their briny throats.
A crab becomes his first mate, clicking tales
Of pearl-eyed mermaids stitching sailors’ veils.

**VI**
But deeper still, the sacrifice takes root:
To save his child (or so the fever’s moot),
He carves his arm—a map on parchment skin—
Letting life’s ink pool where gulls wheel in.
“Each drop a league,” he croons to jealous skies,
“To buy her breath, I’ll pay in crimson miles.”

**VII**
The days unspool. His blood now thins to mist,
Yet still he walks, through landscapes that insist
He’s but a footnote in some god’s jest-book.
The locket with her portrait, long forsook
To save its weight, lies buried leagues behind—
Her face now smudged in his salt-rotted mind.

**VIII**
At last, the sea—or is it?—shimmers near,
A mercury shore where no waves crash or veer.
He plunges in, arms raised in parody
Of baptism’s hope, but this metallic sea
Clots in his lungs, a quicksilver embrace
That steals his breath yet cannot drown his face.

**IX**
Now fully claimed by the devouring bleached,
His body sinks yet never finds the reef.
The desert, satisfied, exhales one sigh—
A zephyr lifts the locket left to die.
Its rusted clasp gives way. The portrait flies—
A girl’s smile swallowed by the cobalt skies.

**X**
Thus ends the mariner’s arithmetic
Of loss: each step subtracted waves’ arithmetic,
Each thirst-parched hour dissolved love’s vivid dye,
Till even sacrifice forgot its why.
The dunes resume their slow, serpentine dance,
Erasing all. The horizon wears no trance.

No ballads name this grave of salt and sky.
No wreaths are cast where nameless dreamers lie.
The sea, the sand—one vast, amnesiac womb—
Breathes on, untouched by memory’s fragile bloom.
Somewhere, a child feels sudden, shapeless woe,
Then turns to watch a lone gull’s spectral glow.