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Martin Narrod Apr 2017
4:11:11- 12:38p.m.  Writing yourself around.  Claim ticket for many fissuring endings, weather beats and other written tumors in subways, like French films, and also has decadence- bright white blinding air falls and standard auto-motifs.  Crushes like I built the car not only planned on packing it.  Not just filled the trunk with four boxes and a bag of clothes but made myself responsible on the other end of the message, you will return again to the rotations of your childhood and the laughing will seem fresh and abundant as never before.I claim Sheridan Road and all of its turns.  You can take back the night, I have no use for things I can't keep my eyes on, these quality treasures and true folds in letters, signed, sealed, surrendered.  The most peculiar of the mix, wakes of the standard in residual unfamiliar outcomes of even the subdued yet idle symbolic thorns and irregular poisons that seem manageable for a moment.  or seven.Lesser thans and greater chaoses.  Long whiles in engagements and other battle scars hidden by the clock in the moon.  Day trips to yesterday and 4:00p.m. you call its.  So for your heaven and these nouns, be it the wire of this breath to slay sickness from the weeds and list the ups against an itinerary finalized with, "produce."
Martin Narrod Apr 2017
brown-outs and in and out from blacking out
this kingdom of cloth, yachts, canvas dogs baring oil and a glass full of scotch, yonder the dogma of breaking out. This is a bank robbery, a fight so let's break it up. Baking club. Two cups of brown sugar, four cups of flour, two packets of apple sauce, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, two sticks of butter, come on now and stir it up. Things are stirring up. Flower petals and Hawaiian Punch, gardenias, orchids, a yellow top, blue jeans, and a green house walk.

California. Top-less, top-down convertible, brief rain on sunny days, and Urth Cafe for lunch. Valet parking on Melrose and window shopping with Snoop Dog at Rick Owens just to stir it up. While some things blur, all the best and brightest with their young supple ******* get together, eat lsd, just to sieve our cells so we can watch as the day is slurring us. Our words and our dance cards are hurting much. The drive to the desert while the beat brings us together and the Santa Ana's blow the pollen from the coast towards the Getty and it seems that our allergies aren't cured enough.

Two homemade lemonades in mason jars seem to me too ****, but to the youth it's the heat that packs the punch. An ounce for three hundred is way too much, on and on like an Indie song goes, Hot Chip and our Captain, we ride the Pacific Ocean while our skins tan under the heavy sun. One woman for me if it's you, is the best, and quite enough. So write your book about sailing a 12' Sunfish through the archipelago when you were four years old, and I'll edit myself into our narrative, use a paddle if the wind won't lift the main sail, and we can try to get home before the water swallows us. Blend the tropics with the fruit, and sneeze while facing the sun, if it's too much we can use Jet Skis and let the current bring us back to the coast one by one. Don't stop or drop the beat, don't worry because we've parked for free, so long as our batteries don't die, our flashlights will lead us home, it's a miracle to you, but just a number and a ticket to me, this is where the fun has just begun. Stirring it upside down, like a glass sailboat in a bottle and a love letter bleeding in salt water, have your romance but keep the sand out of our sheets, it's not like it's our bed, so we can't just have our fun.

I've taken a photograph. Way down in Alabama. Far into the delta where there's no cell signal, and the blues plays through our guitar, if you can do the harmony, I can sing for fun. It's not easy, the sound of our friends dying, drowning, in the despair their disease has overrun. But if we double our dreams, tear our skins and skip the streamers, blow up the balloons and catch the murderers that killed our son.

We can watch from the coast, stand at the top of the plateau, throw rocks into the cove, and free ourselves from a funeral that halves each other thru the mid-life synthesis we've been putting ourselves through, we can count, use the buddy-system and whistle loudly, fuse our genitals and flirt in a party that's just me and you, you might find that there's still fun for us, and this insanity isn't real, it's just a surrealist manifesto that in this earthquake we've just been painting our paths into. We've just begun to believe what isn't really grief but ought to be an afternoon or hunting and traveling at a grueling pace, with meager rations, there's not a snake bite I wouldn't be willing to **** the venom out of you, I'm just hoping you'd be willing to **** the venom out of me in time before I'd have to ask you to.
Martin Narrod Apr 2017
This is my body.
You know it. You touch my teeth with your fingers, my imperfect teeth. The teeth I brought home from the Czech Republic after pulling off my braces with pliers, after not having a toothbrush or fluoridated water for half of a year, you tell me that you love me and my teeth. You know they make me so uncomfortable.

You lay beside me in bed. You put your right hand in my left hand, your right leg over my left leg, and you tell me that your boyfriend is only your boyfriend because he was the opposite of your ex. He's not the one you want to be with, he's the one you just happen to be with.

I tell you we shouldn't kiss until it's over between the two of you.

This is my body, it's driving the car you're in. I fill up the gas tank and ask you where you'd like to go. You say you'd like to go anywhere. I drive us through Chicago, we go up one street and then down the next. I drive us downtown on Lake Shore Drive, across the city on Grand Avenue and over to Ohio, then I put us on the highway and then I take us off. We take North Avenue from I-94 to Wells to Lincoln and then North again until the car runs out of gas again. I fill up the car with gas, again.

I look at your face, your hair, your hands and your legs, I love your legs, your face, your lips, and the words coming out of your mouth.

I didn't know I could be happy like this again. I didn't know I could be so attracted to someone's body and so attracted to someone's mind- at the same time. I tell you that you should break up with him before we kiss, even though I just want to kiss you now. I want to kiss you now and now and now and now, and we start making promises, we start telling each other that there are rules for how to live life by understanding it. You understand your life and you understand me in it. I understand you and trust everything you say. You're right, brave, brilliant, and beautiful. I love the sound of your voice and the words you choose to use.

I'm sure we've known each other for over a decade. This is my body. This is your body. We are perfect and animated towards one another, and I like it, I love it. And I'm so ******* lucky.

I never have been as brave nor as bold as you've shown me I can be. I could be so brave and full of grace and excitement, and enchanted immensely by every gesture and breath that comes from you. I had previously been riddled with immense insanity before we met. I was sworn towards unmistakeable insanity, and doomed to a life of solitude and sadness, I had lived in a wash of thick melancholy, and I knew, and my friends agreed that my body and I would  never know happiness, pleasure, or awesomeness anymore.

You're driving me happily crazy. Fueled by unmistakeable excitement, and on the way towards a future of wildly enticing momentus togetherness.

You and your little dog too.
Martin Narrod Apr 2017
Drink dead moths darling, in smushy twilight. There's its grave in our closet against the milky Red sky. Dreams of a young man in a splinter of Night, submits his shadows for reasons, some Sell their dues for new lives. Incredible yawns Child- is your hero a leaf or the tree? Is it a Haunting First Nation People omitted by Sulking owls for breezes. Yore the mountains Can't long now, helter skelter near or afar, some Sell their poisons, others chisel their bark. And the hide is entrenched now, it's nearly six in the dawn, where the white women wake to the Weeping hearts read in palms. If the desert Should call us, back to roots that won't grow, Take your devils and walk with me in a plastic Flower grove. Wolves and a memory, calls for Many too late, sorrow switches the time stamp Where forever we played, and tonight no one Watches, tonight we the buffalo cry, and some Chase silver-dollars for the truth in their time. In their time, in their time. Someone far far away. Lest our treasures grow weary, as we forget how we played, some sunny day. Some winter day, far far away. Farther and farther from the things we once slayed.
Martin Narrod Mar 2017
Heaps of her across the deserted plains, oily fingers reaching up and over the horizon until all of the numbers fill her pockets, her father worried, and her muses covered with goat-head's thorn. Where does she start to fuse her needs with the weapons in their suburban corolla of lilacs and wanton redolence? It's the opacity in her finger nibs and the dozens of names she felt closing over her legs sideways, until she awakens in the night to take the blood dripping cotton tissues off of her face, off of her bed-side dresser table. She can't even paw forward or undress her wetness in haiku. Everyone she knows doesn't know her. Everything she's seen, doesn't seem to be there for her anymore. That's the trade they told her to barter for, the golden seals and vitamin needs she's gobbling up by the palmful every morning by seven.

Seven for the circus or the mimes, seven for the cloves hanging from the door and seven for the queries that strike back her abcesses and cost her seven by the quart and seven for the plastics. Seven dancing backwards towards a rook or a *****, seven inside her chest playing guitar with David Bowie, seven at the doggerel, and seven for the stitch and the obtuse- only a creature of seven might go for her, in a spot of doves, crank, and soda it is poison, seven is her ***** line, her sexuality, her sinfulness, and her latitude over and over again. Seven makes her want for tomorrow, seven takes tomorrow and throws itself up against the wall, pledging a game in the summer, seven to a trip of caramel and dukes, seven for the prince and the painting of the two of them, seven for the winter, and for the shadows that stretch curiosity past the breath of a summons', seven for the day and seven for the evening, seven scratches her ears and pulls out her hair, seven is the ring and the blue phantom buried somewhere far, far away, green is what's left, but seven knows which way the rain comes and who is going to follow it through.

There is a numbness that radiates on the fringe, a tickly discomfort not even a narrator could let out or down to a name on the mountains near the **** plateau that conquers her nuance, and shakes the both of them to core of the fight. This is not a flag that costs us in coins or in dollars. This is the worry chiseling our shapes and our buttery hips, a stacked set of crazy in a photograph off the leash of only a few. And it calls them to the night when it's only three of us left, until every cord is untied, until every verb is set in its caste, or ringing out to the tremolos of rapture, and the musicianship of pepper-jacked sneezes in the ambers and umbers that although startling, we've all learned to convert our averages in order to swing under the storm, and baby each of us with an elixir of myriad captures, images, and violent abuse.

While the words can yield, and the festivities can hoard each of the simple new experiences against travels of women, and pictures from Mussorgsky riling up soft drinks and evocations towards the center where all of us sometimes will let ourselves, let loose. Something horrendous and cold plugging into the sugars, something quiet, nearly a friend of reminders, crustaceans and ocean making this top-down beach of faces for all to shake and roll with or set forward a cacophony of abuse. Until in a breath she calls for the infinite intuition sheltering her and our window from the pain of misuse.

That is the photograph where we have been looking to live, here is the memory we spent our minds trying desperately to relive in the shade and in the snafu, against the bark and the piano keys treating our rise. Within our skin and our pupils, our silver bookends and/or the mammals we don't use names for but for whom we've been introduced to.
Martin Narrod Feb 2017
Being a poet, a heavy handed right-hand writer, is to me, being a sociopathic killer of language. Hands that worship sometimes the least popular fruit, the myrrh or the mana, the young woman or the homeless man-animal, prostitutes and the dregs of civilization.

Here I am, shuffling through my cabinets, searching out that precise instrument, for this precise moment. My repertoire of blades, bludgeoning objects, handyman's tools: the hammer, axe, screwdriver, sieve, staple gun, nail gun, jigsaw, bandsaw, handsaw, and wrench, also too there are wood chippers, snippers, clippers, scissors, tapes, shanks, cords, ropes, and wires. I do not prefer the six or twelve shooter, the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic pistol, the M-14 rifle or the M1 Garand. Too many are there to name the incredibly effective pharmaceuticals, including the human tranquilizers, animal poisons, toxic chemicals, and household cleaning products. I do want for these, though many of the myriad instruments I've listed work with great efficacy, eliciting the desired pleasure or response from he or she who wields them. I instead choose the the pen. Any pen will do, though I prefer the Uniball .7mm with black ink, as blue to me does not possess the intensity and seriousness that must be conveyed or omitted. The pen can chisel away the unwanted or offer the necessary temperament and intensity, which might be required. For each killing is unique unto itself. No ****** is quite like the other, though there are similarities between them on some occasions.

It must be I that wields the pen and not the other way around. This relationship is one-sided, and must be orchestrated by me and only me, lest I should sacrifice the personal nature of this hauntingly ferocious arrangement between ink and instrument, instrument and I. A gravely serious one-way, unreciprocated, and unbalanced, nearly schizophrenic performance of language that is never heard nor displays no sound, which instead draws heavy sanguinated strokes, marks, scribbles, and inscriptions amidst other fanatical displays of power and allegiance, ego and lust, eloquent rage and fetishized insanity. Each movement of the hand readies this god-sized control to the pen, exercising its tumultuous rein of might, choosing to exact its motive on this word, while ignoring and sometimes even skipping over whole sets of words, sentences in some instances, while in others it chooses to exhaust itself in wholly unbelievable performances of carnage, destroying speech, and slaying, splicing, and splitting-up complete sections of the English language.

In some cases neglecting those words that might seem noisome or rank to some folks, only to select and offer penalty to others, it chooses on occasion to ostracize other more sweetly and eloquent pieces of speech, it chooses which parts of our alphabet to select and which words or letters it ought to omit.

****** after ******, the writer counts each ****, committing every instance to memory, and on some accounts he or she might even bring home a treasure or trinket, something small though, not bigger than that of a pomegranate though often not smaller than the wick of a candle. The writer takes this together with any artifacts or materials that could tie his or her method to his or her execution. Until, at last amid the company of themselves, they can revel in their vain glory and perfervid excite for the acts they've chosen to commit and the acts they've chosen to omit.

It's in these brief moments, when the speaking ceases, and the company is called to rest, there can be found an easing and peaceful contentment. Each room slowly ushers out any of the unwanted sounds of the day. Finally, he or she may sit or stand, lay or play, undisturbed by agonizing wants or needs, and happily, having chosen to keep many cupfuls of pens, not only on their work-bench and writing desk, but in the kitchen, in the living room, and in every room.

In recent years, I've begun to notice that nearly every home and establishment, business, and institution keeps at least one pen on hand. If only for those special moments of social awkwardness when at last the spoken language holds no greater power than can be wielded under the grand spells and vespers, free-verse, stream-of-consciousness, or prose that quickly by taking up the pen can offer to its bearer in short time steadfast relief or certain resolve. For the heart certainly pumps more ink than it does blood.
Martin Narrod Feb 2017
If it waits it tumbles him do so.
In the heif of the number of his woe.
And so blood splatters by the thousands
As if a thud heaves his cycle forward.

It was the grotto that before him,
Undertook the incline or the thrill.
And if the rider should go outside again,
Blood ****** and splatter may be his role.
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