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Martin Narrod Apr 2014
She had stopped crying.
All evening in her black-mesh coup de voodoo.
On the plane she had been crying
For her Summer pal. Yesterday she had been to market
Big brown bags and white bags, little pink bags filled with crimsony scents,
Capricornia, looseleaf newsprint, postcards, and colored pencils,
She had hands full of handles, bags bundled, stitched in strict Saturday fashion.
He could barely break a step, he could fake dance with her feet on his tip toes.
She was only three quarters the perfect size to fit inside his frame.
The grand disappearing act. And she was only ifs and suicides.
A stranded ray of sun-draped hair on a cooly porcelain forehead, the segments were all just wrong,
Something so wrong, trembling heart cries over a mute coo through a flattened tongue.
The sickle tongue, dodgy on Tuesday's, She had a simple mug, oh! But so cute and soothing, the nape
That wrapped around, my arm lapped its hands in a clapping ginormous duck's bill!
Lapping rhythmically. Thwack! Thwack!
Like no crying I had ever heard. Nor Earthen beauty I had never seen.
Her little lamb legs lumbered over, her awkward thinness and long limbs spilt on top of her,
Her tiny shoulders searching for support from her hips. White aurulent doll head on a stick,
She had sad defeated eyes, whimpering, pathetic,
Too small, and she shuttered and she shook,
And she shivered out every teardrop her body ever made. And she fell back on her bottom, and looked
Up as if to see a white steed standing with her guy striking a poised hand down to her,
He split down the middle, stammering, broken pieces of words crumbling out of his mouth
With eager intentions. He was too weak
To give her his feet, or pull her up in, he hadn't the gumption. He was fully occupied standing,
He wept too; then shuffled a little
Towards where she had fallen. He knew she wasn't right
She couldn't get the devil out of her piercing blue pupils, she couldn't
She lied.
Then she just piled on top of her knees and fumbled as if to rise like a demure lamb trying to rise off its Newborn legs, she just curled her legs,
So stiffly built, and narrow footed, built with such inequality to her siblings,
She got in the way of herself, a little lamb that could not manage.
Too whittled for him, he tried, he really tried, but three years had drained his strength, no real help.
When he sat her upright on her bottom, she opened her eyes, and for a moment smiled, grabbed for His hand but then after awhile she was lost, she lost interest, her pupils wandered.
He was orchestrating everything.
A real project, much more urgent and important. By nightfall she could not stand. It was not
That she couldn't smile or laugh or love, she was born
With everything but the will to live -
That cannot be destroyed, just like a love.
Melancholy was more important to her.
Life could not get her attention.
So she died, with her handles still in her hands, green grass stains her legs.
She did not survive another warm summer night.
And then he wept uncontrollably again.
"The wind is oceanic in the elms
And the blossom is all set."

2

The boy has come back
From the seashore, and atop the plateau.
The woes of women are like a genocide
In the morning, when the killing is over,
And the heat begins, and the bodies lie,
And stark life moves for its sobbing bones,
The curved women move with fire.
Father Father Father the girls
Are weeping, and crying and I cannot resist that gentle frailty
They are shucked in their skin suits rising from their soporific slumbers
In decadent leathers and frou frou dresses. They cling to bold faces,
Nothing can escape that cold crying of women weeping for their princes.
Blood-letting rage cannot overthrow the meadow from the pebble brook,
As a laden head bleats its tarnished tongue across a milky breast, it cannot
Escape the sounds of blue-stained teardrops cascading across the plains,
The sounds of woolbirds braying while their skins are sheared against the
Sluicing sound of water rushing through the flume.
All summer they have lamented, gorging on melancholy, tottering their cotton pyramid heads,
Shaking their cries in deliberation, bald skinny victim women screaming out!
Cotton-mouthed clams yaffing, hearts in panic, wholes of bodies clambering in a *** of woe.
They roost useless, pollard and wethered, jealous
Squinting out the last droplets of desperation from their eyes, screaming their mouths in awful
Togetherness, this cacophony of tortured tongue-song
They curdle the last notes of despair out under knotted breaths
With every inch of strength left inside them, they bray this way and that.
Their mothers scream out in wretched despair, ahhh!
On distant cliffs, on scrawny legs
Their stiff pain goes on and on in the September heat.
"Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,"
Whipped bodies toting wergeld on a shore.

The Day She Died

Was the gloomiest day of the new century,
The first of calamitous, unfortunate autumns to come,
The first dying breath from piceous lungs.

That was yesterday. Early morning, soft rime droplets
Frosted to every blade of grass, not like any other
Earlier June day we've ever had. In the deep twilight
The syzygy announced the moon and demoted the sun.

The Earth-crisp frost nuzzled snow droplets.
Black bands of ravens whipping. Martens littering
Fresh kills of red-eyed rabbits on stark white stale
Summer lawns. A fox grayed, its cold bones
Mapped by ravaged feasts. A possum prowling
In a spot of tawny light.

The concrete spread into a maze
Of black veins ripening in the acute niello
Destitution of its widening cracks,

And when the summer left
It left without her. It will have to accept,
In the paley dim light of this vengeful wilderness -
She is gone.
But for now the warmth has not returned but a naked, half-pomegranate
Rotten moon for us two.
And a great vacancy in our memory.
Written for Britni West
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
I have a blue blanket, it looks corduroy but it's synthetic polynesian cotton.
Considered by some to be polyester. After the ninth year of ownership I started
Telling house guests it had always been mine; but secretly knowing it came from my
Ex Kristina who left it with some of her other things in 2005 in my grand deluxe Evanston
Apartment. In like some really awesome way, I could fold the corners together to see little blocks
Of the Universe form cubes in the fourth dimension and gain a better understanding of my own
Little black shmata. Top drawer, white dresser, in the back with the leftover girlfriend underwear between
My first ever stuffed animal dog/rabbit.

Amazing how these thinned and frayed azure threads had held so many midnight conversations Together- maybe fifteen other girls had nuzzled with Kristina's blanket. Last year the guilt set in. You Watch a girlfriend, say, ratchet through your room naked for something soft to put over her to listen to
Some half-stanza from the new Yeats critical and that, do-I-tell-her feeling comes over you. Blue Polyester really had a way with women. My last serious crush, the one of six months, the one from the place that was close to where I worked six days a week, would you believe, she had not interest in that heap of thread, under my pillows spying on us sleep for twenty-four long weeks.

"Drop in the bucket" the sixty-year-olds say. I say, bring me my ******* fourth dimension blocks and cubes *******. I want to visit the existential, I want to experience the hoo-ra and Ga-Ga those kids throw around on Milwaukee waiting for $150 NBA slippers.

Wednesday is my day for telling the truth.
2:00p.m. sitting in the front of her alizarin El Dorado.
"I have something I have to tell you,"  I said, my mouth practically filled with marbles as I barely could Utter the words: it's not going to work out.
Written For Jeff Sherfey
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
A bird in an aurulent billed mud-face,Living as a four foot two inch dragon in a San Franciscan cave,
Lifts off from a hot breathed murmur of Gideon.
Even in night the whole grandeur of movement
Soaking in red beeping heart-pangs
Fasten to the thrusts of his arms.
This post of vainglory was the opening of the year.
In July's open pores,
On a spatial plateau of Dodonian oak.
The Penguin
Unveils his weakened voice.
Flattening into a wide arrow
Draped from Carina he
Sails Westward. Barefooted through the Anavros
Molting under deep helplessness and melancholia.
With his inlaid eyes faced askance
The penguin broods
Among the day's songs
Cast into the poetry of the lyre,
Stretched upwards from Paradise Bay to Colchis,
Where his ebony wings
Soak into the palms of Peleus
Suffering only where the arrows have flung.
Downside up, with children in a pocket of blood,
Among supergigantic siren songs and muse poems
Sewing teeth into a spot of Earth
Races towards a column of toppling strakes.
An Interpretation of the Search For the Golden Fleece
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
1909, on top of the dragon.
Marigolds whipping a tepid fug in this small room of stringy daylight.
That place where we fell in love. Where I dropped a hot cup of tea on my pants
And we ate sushi on the beach. I love the beach.

I am not ready for the ice festival or your new boyfriend.
He smells like bad disco and old people.
This piano concerto that I play before bed, before awakening,
I have your black dresser drawer in my bedroom,
It glistens of our days of Jasmine and Roses.

My mind blurs stories of you, her, and the other girl.
Rad violin songs, a friend from Argentina has introduced me to
Mystify me, I cannot hear straight or stand still. I have acquired
A gift for shivering. Still I can feel your talons raking up my spine.
*******! Where? Why? How did you do that thing with your mouth?

I count upwards from you and in my peaking hours of misfortune, I
Never come back down to earth's giant centrality of duel existence.
My gut expands into my chest, my nervous system and anxiety is
All of you, a lot of her, and none of the other girl.
I make half inch black markings on the wall, this curse of feeling and not forgetting
That never goes away.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Let me know the sweetness of the canopy. The gentle cygnet garden you express in rows. I drift upon the aching embers of the bark of midnight's supper, its kingdom of darkness that I lay upon. Suspended in the air, rocking steadily on a distant plateau, tilling the granules of the earth in my map-lined hands; I pinch the rocks and sand kernels naming places as I snap my fingers. I go to the top of the city I know, a small yellow house in a crowd of tall aspens- and the Catholic church sends me soda and small biscuits, and the Hebrews help me be a better man.

I go to a place which has very small rooms. My legs are like a giant world-sized forklifts that carry the heirlooms of my parents in and out of this universe into another. I make a stride to catch a glimpse of you in passing. I tilt my eyes. I hope that I can see how beautiful you are, once more, if only I lift my head  towards the way in which I know you, or the way in which I once had.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
When my heart beats black inside my chest, and the days I have are filled with death, and the girls I know won't walk with me, then I have my choice in misery. All the birds have died, and the plains are dry, the skyscrapers aren't lit up at night, and the city's sound sounds like nothing, then I have my choice in suffering. People talk a lot, but they hardly speak, all their voices creak in the summer streets, everybody walks but they're not moving, I try to only observe but then I start screaming.

I ******* hate the way that you look at me, your skin's so ******* clean that it feels *****, your eyes move around but you're not seeing, the way I hurt each day but you say nothing. If I tried to leave you might be happy, so I sit and be and go out at night and cheat. I would break your heart, but it hardly beats. You're my walking dead, my darling zombie.

Each day is second rate, I bore so easily. It's like the day we met ended your pleasantry. I startle all the time, you seem so unaware. I chose you number one, you chose to not even care.

I caressed you once, and undressed you thrice, you abandoned me in the middle of the night. All the time I halved, you had your own account, of every thing we did, it wasn't the right amount. Now I hardly care about the drugs you're on. I'm quoting blasphemy out of every psalm. Even the words I write don't tell half of the truth, about the way I felt chasing after you.
Written for Britni West
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
You choked on chariots raw. Red egg yolk suppers, churned of the milk oceans this morning you kept.
The lintel of stone turned toward dusk. Some great dynasty of submissive spirits catering your morning
Out on a cart of muse, forms of heaven cannot even hear you. You are a soporific knot in the tale of your Old womanhood. In this infinite Tuesday morning your small black eyes, like an oil tanker toppling over The intense azure sea- shipwrecked, and lost.

Departing from your childhood you slurp Coca-Cola from a silver straw. From the corner store and inside Winter yawns. There is no face, only strikingly beautiful black hair. The body under you is at home in all
My hand's fingers have to fill. All the clothes that you could carry for the two-way adventure. There are
Never enough bubbles between your lips and the glass bottle you have. Only the score of the whistleblower. And the poor symphony you had prayed for into the dial-tone phone, the deep Wilderness, that stiff forever-ago budding from your coffee cup. Neurogenesis lifted from your Fingerprints and emblazoned into this lump of human ingenuity. The hopeless octave that cut us all short.    

Every short story that was left untold. There are the brief deaths recoiling in your spiritual architecture. The ****** of morphia has bourn me awake. Inside you are often unscathed, vanishing as some of Tonight's parts assemble you, on you blue is a beautiful color. The sweet retreat that gave you life or the bountiful deaths that counted you too cutely by your side. You are the sun in my black coat. Here is my sea, your sea, you'll see.
Written for Anna Farinola
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Numbers of the lights still don't add up. The dream station on the orange bridge's sands, is so totally too far away to fly to. My life according to the animadversion of my dreams. The harangue and opprobrious odium whilst wandering about aimlessly in the square, on the blackened honey trail where I was cast around like some pebble lapidated by the wind. I barely stand, a hyaloid column soaked in fear and ambiguphobia; one girl's face is blurred by this maddening diplopia. While the haze drapes me in its suits of cinereous gray, I crawl sadly up the rise while I am bruised from the battering. My fuscous body heaps itself, exhausted and pandiculating, all I can make out in the advesperating and cloudy night, in all of its dourly silences- the gold hair fixed against the banner of light in the darkening sky and her beautiful blue eyes.
ambiguphobia: n. the fear of being misunderstood
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
In day's prime, in summer's sweet eyelids,
Two lives arc, their eyes struggling to break a stare, sharing trysts through dulciloquent exchange,
After the deep blue blossoming lake. To avenge time, we sought it and drove our pupils
Down through the bluff and the green trees, limping past the arenose and albicant sands
Into it's quivering- I must say.

Hey fancy. You make me smile regularly,
I need you to know, because I don't always say so,

but if I didn't read what you write about
your interactions with life,
I'd definitely be not the half that I am of alive.

So thank you, from the perfume of my heart,
and the plastic that is my legs,
the opossum hair that makes me who I am,
and the light of my malaise.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
I trace my finger around. With red lipstick on I wear the skin of the pets I had, looking like a marigold shot through the head, my bare skin is barbed in the back. Such trouble and quiet with the wrap-around, the cross-walk, and floral shop as I browse. The white elephant in the upstairs bedroom, is making it hard for every one of us to sleep. With this Africa becomes a disease, that I unwrap from a cotton white sheet. When I breathe life is going good, under the spells of wicked and word. I like to call out in the night, so with no response I can plead for the courage to think; all the suburban philistines try to help me, but I can't tell a joke because I cannot read. Every thing amounts to being fat. Or liquidated in the most pathetic singles party for Karl Lagerfeld.

Numb fingers slur the words as I type telephone numbers that end in threes. I see a notice to be called upon, but it's hard to remember what day it is when your job only pays you in financial advice, "Don't do as I do, but please just do what I say." And I can smell that. The approach that a hunter brews in his midnight solemn cup of tea. Where a voice chimes in while a mouse runs out, dragging the corners of my eyes in a lagging meme, it doesn't do well to even be yourself sometimes, once while traveling I couldn't see. Come that morning I had left my hotel pass inside my favorite pants, black denim toting paint from a ******* shot, a picture that explains my disease.

The fifty inch fan hums an anonymous tune that when I turn quickly towards it becomes this feral baboon. And is it hardly based on fact or is it the illusions and the myths that Christopher Robins struck inside of me. With his griseous hands made of soot and of gouache, that worshipped animals that wear clothes outside. And even sometimes there are z's that transform into other creatures that hum real fast and talk out loud in nursery rhymes, a Whatsit and a Woozel are totally, too much for me. I turn the fan off and lay back down, and fight the world off with hands from another guy, much braver than I who doesn't even have tattoos but he's the top wordsmith from Buckingham. What a beautiful treat and such a magnificent surprise that the elephant lays down to die. Of course that's when my mouth dries up with smoke and my voice turns into the vanilla flavoring that everyone hates, and then too I felt like laying down to die. But I'm not 97 like I had thought I'm quite sure that I'm still alive. The white moon shines into my bedroom window at night and I pretend that I direct for the sky.
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