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Martin Narrod May 2014
Something original. Of newer words, that originate from the pleasure and happiest of timeless incidents. The happenings, back of the park, near a set of restrooms, a pool of clear sea water and a purplish-red starfish. A sea cucumber. Trailing sea lions diving off of a cliff, a vertical display of rocks, moving a millionth of an inch each year. You caught me.  --------

I can't nail it. It happens to me when I sleep, it comes around me, over my shoulders and latches onto my breaths. I'm breathing and it creeps inside of me like a mealworm, I turn to look for it and it disappears again. It lives in a shadow but it is also a shadow of itself. An anomaly, a space for time and the tell of time, its hidden agenda, its positive nature, how it yields itself to prey, how it coos for a sweet smile, runs up to me in mid-day traffic, and kisses me, noon at military time.  ------  

The blessings come. All of them. Laid out on a table in red and white checkerboard, making the eggplant parm and the homemade vinaigrette. Peanut butter chocolate chip vegan cookies. A dandelion necklace that only fits around my wrist. It makes me weep some twenty years ago on a Playskool slide, orange, red, bright. I'm looking around my neck and still it's not there. Every where I want to be, every where I've gone and could go. I should go to California too but all of this...stuff, everywhere, under my legs, in my pockets, the closets tumbling high and low, I haven't had enough to change, and still I am wanting something else. You the same, my shoulders tell me stories, I listen and I fall asleep.  -----  

Sometimes my nerves grow quiet, my words grow- but then they just fall again, skittering in a lull plash of blue-green pond water. The bench I sewed to the ground. A tale of mirth and woe. I cannot call on you, you will not come. Sleeping beauty, blue eyes, blonde hair. I wrestle you in the day to day, the hour to hour. Minutes cannot go by. Pages that turn but I remember everything. My mind will never go.  -----  

Two pink letters in the post today. Maybe neatly placed for you. A fake-tattoo puffin, upper-left hand corner. My hands are empty, they have indecent memories, they write indelible superpowers. I can't go on. I run lake water over my ankles, slowly drift beneath arcing waves and cold grey skies. Half a day blue goes black, night comes and I whisper when the sky goes quiet. Nothing is as serious as this.   ------    


In a white box there are two pairs of shoes and a soft bear. The bear without the name. He doesn't speak to me so I leave him with the sea birds. Put them in a push cart and show them off, I take them here, I take them there. No one asks his name, where he's going, what he's going to do. ------------


Tuesday's are the worst. I count and count and count. I will never forget Tuesday's, twisting like a cuneiform jelly, fingernails spoiling me-meat, breaking the Styx crossing the river Rhine, there is nowhere that I will not go, only for me to cross time. To wait, I really hate waiting. Nothing comes between, I lie to a stranger and they fall in love instantly. I see you on Monday evenings and I want to kiss you gently, the sides of your neck, on the inside of your hand. Where do you go when all the shadows go? ----

Some of me is backwards. The waves shape the sky. A rabbit goes with a fire truck, a blueberry with a cephalopod. Back to the soft wood walls of the cotton luxe room. My legs have never felt so safe, you have never made my teeth so happy. In Russia you touch my face, I see you, a picture of you, any part of your eyes or the things you draw upon and I am instantly in love. I love you, a part of you, all of the parts of you, your soul is the only part of me disconnected. You are the happiest moments of my pleasure. You taste like Tahitian Vanilla and Acai berries. Gold grains hit our shins as we go like great wild horses through the alluvial plains. -----

I cannot count to you. There are no goddesses in numbers. I only have sleep, for you to look me square away into a bliss I have in a picture of the two of us, lost in our faces, our hands wandering each others knees. I sit across from you and I am not close enough. I go closer and I want to be inside of you, all across my limbs expanding our spiritual forms, intertwining in our skins. So I speak, I lay my words gently in front of you so you cross them as you walk our path, back from the sea into a narrow slumber. Sleep is the only place we all can play. You, me, her, her, and I.
Martin Narrod May 2014
Soy
You were totally something else. Like a calm respite overcoming an instance of excitement. Magic and other prime words that can dictate the inarticulate adjectives that was this afternoon. Happiness and pleasure. A coexistence. To coexist. Soy.
Martin Narrod May 2014
It's like this, and then there was total recall. Fast like a safety plan made wrong and then bouncing in and out all the way down the hall. Up through cable cars, Korean fast food market, wet fish, soupy street, concrete cracks filled with crab meat and **** heads. Just a square, a five block, two street, sideways quadrangle, beat of the Tenderloin, hour of the dove. Every one's dead on these loose ends. Hills of the back of her backside, skin of the back of her neck. Rapture is the grave of the sunset, memory is that thing that I said.

No one cans in carnivores, no one runs moves like a shepherd. Sunday, daft as candy, luck in the ways of the prophet. Canon of the blaze of every woman that died today. The sleep setting, the motorcycle bending the hollow, the ravines noisy interlude, up through the rough and the tangles, huddles in a six pack, three or four walking up the block to meet the rest of them.

The skin doesn't fit right, it wears wrong, the shoulders stiff, the masseuse excuses himself. Buckets of flowers hang from the ceiling like stripped cat christmas decorations in suburban mastermind serial killer resort town. Everyone is quiet because they gotta. They move their feet like they were hurrying death into a red volcano, like they were the errand of red from the top bell to the bottom of the town.

I sit on a roof top, baking in the noon day sun. Stripping sticks and stems off the side to sideways, just roasting away, laying, low in the afternoon light. I see a girl with her hands on her skirt, wobbling, scooting a priest card on a periwinkle terra-cotta.  I move my head, turn it upside round to take a better look. No one counts to ten when they see me. The gangster that woke up isn't the gangster that went to sleep last night. My wickedness ended my words mean your bright decay. So I ride the pavement exhausted, burying my coughs in an L-shaped arm
Martin Narrod May 2014
Memory

     is  the birth of cool, it is rapture and ignominious spokesmanship unearthed. Packed into a slatted-wood crate, milking the obsession from cash-toting hands. Freeing itself from your bottom lip while life ticks itself away on a digital stock-exchange display. I am down and you are up, and you save pennies while I search for Chrysanthemums and vanilla-scented candles. Scent is my fifth grade spaceship,
     I hide it in my pocket and take it into the forest when the week is over. Adventure is the part of our story that's caught in between complaining about money and having clean sheets. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday my hands mend themselves back from bleach, their crevices cave under bright lights, I go to the garden strip and put dirt on my face, over my shoulders, and on my back. I make a altimeter from an alarm clock, and worry what will happen if your feet should ever touch the ground.
Relief
     is a sarcophagus, the satiny silk chrysalis I weave into invincibility. I make myself a small child with a demon-proof lair, no one comes in, not even you.  I see

     how drugs take out your heart and put you anew, fresh: orange, pink, ultramarine. A wave is a soft gesture for twilight, a slow walk among the greying statue towers, bliss extracted from person to person tedium. How you exclaim about **** music as if your temple home was unfocused by jazz or synth-electro.
     I forgot your room of quiet had no bells, no hope, and no notes of resolve. Tragedy was the desert of your six to sixteen, while I made an opus out of crystal glasses and Cran-Raspberry jars. Then it was the relief, Neptune's hands on your *******, red dots of ecstasy connecting you to a higher vibration. You felt it was time to start exercising. I didn't **** you for modifying your perception of color, degrading in a salt pool- I didn't own your ****** it was just a place I went into to write.
    
    Three years later. I was growing backward, I was sixteen, making you the muse in my doorway, a James Bond goddess unraveling my fingers on her silky skin, except your golden crown was really a turban of snakes, and instead of silk I was groveling underneath you. That was the sweat that Ryan Shultz said I garbled up into two pedestal doves, I aimed by eyes straight at the city of gold, and then inside me shucked out every piece of self-respect and vitrified my spirit, castrating my lips and my tongue for something to come to or come at, he said I lived under pointed stars and that lying isn't a good way to get over past phases of silence.

     A few days ago, it all game back to me, in a random series of songs on an iTunes playlist. One memory from an isolated beach outside a strawberry patch near Santa Cruz, a second, two hands cupped over the ears, my face closing in on her smoothed-out pink bottom lip on an over-exagerated car ride to the San Francisco airport, and the third was the mention of non-vegan banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a birthday I celebrated several years earlier. All of them in the coda.
    
     Verse four unbelievable. It caught me straying from the next stressor at hand. What's next? I move my cold hands from a keyboard versing strange relapse of mind, or I tear out another page, whip across town, and peel stamps onto a postcard to send.
     They were all tails from a memory. A slowing ghost that cooed at me from far away, beating me up and down, pulling my eyes away from a scent I continually tried to remember.
Martin Narrod May 2014
At first when it happens

     it's like a spell, I cast it, it moves me, and I use it.
To the youth with it. Some hollow-gutted frogs' yolks and thrice its weight in pigeon carcass and fly.
Gruesome fruit loosies.

Then somehow the trance begins, the anecdotal watch stopes moving, to the hedge-burn up to the meadow go the witnesses, moving under the guile of fresh addiction. Wicked words, fiery,

a conflagration.

Burning us up. Two in two out.  And just as they get it right, the moon hollows itself out, the sky undergoes a change, a nuance splits open the gut of the world and comes indifference, apathy,

anxiety.

A poem comes.
     It crashes down over my head like an arrow-carved apple, from the Natives. Bending me on my side, my flat side, where I have lived one-hundred years on my side, my left leg nuzzled in between you and the blankets we bought at the thrift store on 26th and Valencia. And it worries me, now that they shift from top-floor to basement in some corner of the Salvation Army. No one owns that magic. They touch the bruised knots of its cotton fibers, and for what-

a throw blanket in a common room.
Martin Narrod May 2014
As the wet wind hums its way through our two tower six-cylinder apartment complex. Birds fall from their naked winter wept branches, braced by stiff bones, mapped out in Alexandria, carrying notes from El Salvador. The corner market is closed, never opened. A hair salon stands in its place, it wrings out the "R's" from a Philadelphia warshing.

And like every night, hot air cakes on an extra layer of indecipherable red dots up the arms and around the neck, minute pustules of hypochondria that steal my finger tips from the keyboard. I scratch and tip them, looking under their fiery scarlet caps for, I-don't-know-what disease. Paul says It's that magic school bus melanoma, typhoid drip, it comes at you from a computer screen and eats at your nervous system until you've got the wambles.

Tuesday's used to be the worst, until I OWNED THAT ****. I make a pronoun out of aluminum foil and wear it as a hat on a first date. Tinder is not bad for conceptual art projects. I carry it within me like an anodyne complex, out into the frozenness; into my mouth the air comes around my teeth, behind my uvula until winter freezes my voice and I am breathless.

I abandon my miniature house to enter the pyramidal pinetum to the North. Wild paradise shrubs gather with songless animal noises watching as I take naked photographs of my father to preserve his body from anything less than his great immortal end. He lives on black moss and water from a nearby pond,

he authors the face of Anthony Hopkins, thrown about, another casualty of fervid and blurry dreaming.
Developed from a dream I had about my own father being Anthony Hopkins, and leading an imaginary brother and I around a carnival, giving us unrealistic orders, demands, and taking us into a game of bumpercars.
Martin Narrod May 2014
They told me the only thing that could cure heartache was war, and since the war wouldn't take me I figure the only thing to do now is take up a life of crime. Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in Love in the Time of Cholera that the only cure for heartache is to find other hearts to break. Five years have passed and I still remember without fail the flint of a lighter, the squint of an eye, and the bell of your dress. I dream a dream each night, sweet variation of the story of you. It comes down to a letter sometimes, I go to the window well with a notebook and a pencil and I draft a sonnet, sometimes a verse, any form of an expression to idle the time it takes for me to find you. I know stars that haven't lived as long. The way I cupped my hands over your ears, the way rapture lived and loved, you kissing me in the shade of the palm trees up their on Notre Damen Ave. I know the curve of the Earth wrapped in the shades of the skin on your body. I live every day for the chance that I will meet you again.
Letter to an ex-girlfriend
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