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Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Mew
as soon as these blue speckled
socks go, that's it. A new bright black death.A solemn weir on a stark horizon.Give me a reason to wear color. My hueless affidavit
runs me into the Earth, where I sprout up
a pallid keb- brain orf'd, you could drag my etiolated ebon
body through the ovine fold or take me to the theater. When I was just a minor teg, I sheared my mim kip, I fuckinggave it to you outright. In this little
cote my wan mien nigrifying; my calamitous black, quaffed full of congou in demitasse, of souchong & saucers. My atrous wethered body albicantly degenerating in the atrous sun. I'm crusting over with wanness and you, you're fortifying in the cwm where I used to yaff and stray. Your ovivorous hunger,something I never knew, when first you came for my jecoral flesh, just another bot digging through my soft toison. Like Dall's Prometheus being sheared from the flock-you cut me away. In this drab and achromic world, you put the wanness in my flesh, the gid in my heart. Still.
Just these blue socks are left.
Written Sitting against an Oak tree outside of a family friend's farm in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Not against the peaks of protest, these aurulent banners and jasperated jaspe so so jargoon! It's like I was suddenly alive, beat-stretched out of winter neige and into the pancosmic blisses of bright and ebullient spring, plugged with an agromania to abide this new formidable friend in the aeviternal beauty of she and I togetherness. Never to spill a morsel of a minute away from us again, upon the newly conjured spirits unto us both. To be amidst a cynosure of such affiation, to be in the temperate or tropical gardens whispering about our mutual love for flowers nad lists. This that precedes us, bright colliding auras in this newfound numinous kindling of us two. Watching it, making it happen- it unfolding before me made me naseaus with excitement, dithering what our next move out to be. I just wanted to kiss her face, her cheeks, put our hands together so quickly, just to let our amorous fug fill the room with silver albuminious smoke from our breaths. Miles below this, round the Earth to other places, there are the fixtures of bright and corybantic life commoved by other nations and other poised people of the light, that I should not be idle in my desires to usher myself into this grand and briguing introduction. So she said, we will play the question game, the inquiry game, we will state the mark, draw upon deep and fantastical recall, bring from our minds the most immense truths and share them, no matter now feral, or caustic, or melancholy- they will be shared until we explode with each other, our intrigues wrapped in our perfervid and amatory excitedness for one another. Too vast with wonder to be afraid of- am I such a fiend for such resplendence. That we could be vitrified in eternity in a veil of fulgurite. So at this nightfall, this acronychal of bloviating bliss, to write and wonder, incessantly in the finest of provincial matters to settle this garden where Thetis lives to be of her, two philocalists in verdant pasture, heaped with matters of the pen and the palm, in the droves of this beautiful advesperating eve- where first I wrote to you, and then I wrote you back.
Written in Atlanta, Georgia
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Yesterday she was nowhere to be found
In the earth or under the earth.


Suddenly she is all here - a bright soon
Of a tomorrow in earnest and potluck joy, embers and pyres, iris and the merriment of ochre.


A star groomed by outer space - spilling wet ash
And fissured out by the tailored saw of the wood.
Now something is stirring in the smolder.
We call it a girl.


Still wowed.
She has no idea where she is.


Her eyes, chalcedony stones, explore ripening doomsday and an ivory moon rock.
Is this the world?
It confuses her. It is a great numbness.


She pulls herself together, rousing to the new weight of things
And to that maternal figure nuzzling her, and to her down burrow.


She rests
From the first infinite shock of light, the empty laze
Of the curious and their curious questions -
What has happened? What am I?


Her ears keep on inquiring, blissfully.


But her legs are impatient,
Mending from so long nothingnesses
Her tiny hands are restless with ideas, they start to try a few out,
Swaying this way and that,
Grasping for balance, learning fast -


And she's suddenly upright


And stretching - a giant hand
Strokes her from top to toe
Perfecting her outline, as she tightens
The knot of herself.
Now she comes to -
Bold, beautiful - Argentina
Over the weird world. Her nose
crimson and magnetic, draws her, consciously sounding,
A petite yaff, aimed towards her mother. And the world is warm
And gentle and softens her daze. Touch by touch
Everything fits her together.


Soon she'll almost be a woman.
She wants to be a Woman,
Pretending each day more and more Woman
Till she's the perfect Woman. The immortal Woman
Will surge through her, weightless, unbound, a twirling flame
Beneath silver gusts,


It will coil her eyeballs and her heels
In a single outlaw fright - like the awe
Between mortar and firework.


And curve her neck, like a crocodile emerging from the placid pond
Among lilies,
And fling the new moons over her shimmery banner,
All the full moons and the dark moons.
Booming, ineffable delight.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Not an amulet, an off white vertebrae; bone.
Brass wire, a loop at one end.
It bends as to make sure this will fit.

A gauge that measures mesmerization,
And we both must get along, but
Not because we're not tough enough:
Most of us aren't soft right yet.

So many stiffs, folly after folly.
The whole carful of loose cadavers,
Dangling, their feet hang with wet snow
And carnage,

Not even musk deer pop up,
They've all gone. Roosting in a parabol,
With X's sprayed to their groins.
Burning pop couples

Doing it like laboratory mice. Capybaras
Hiss, my own burnt blood is also
Flocculating.

Turn the cup upside down and
See the fire's balmy lachrymal opaque
Moss while it does not drip.

This is the story of man you asked me about;
Devoid of a muzzle, fur onto his chest; coarse
Hair in a garland.

It is the God of a tool that buzzes into the night.
A plateau for this most sensible study.
We feel another coming.

And when you awoke, your larval tongue
My eye mush, a song of verse and melancholy.
This half list of greatness, a tally we both wish to see.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
Maybe you're the colosseum. The code to get through the glass doors is actually just '1954'. You could put up the painting of me at auction, or I could take a cruise from London to the Islands North of Siberia, a stop in a department store in Northern Greece. I stop and take a ride in the middle front-third seat of a older friend's younger brother's car, and force all of them to come outside and see the spider's eggs at Bob-o-Link. Massive cornucopias of cotton walls entwined with silk.

In the department store I ask to be introduced to someone who can take me by the hand and recognize me by my number, show me everything I'll need to shoot a full-length feature, even how I can get to Prague so I can do a little shopping. But the horror of seeing is so frightening, and the girl that I came with wants to do nothing.

I find a little shop selling Czech candies, music, and newspapers, so I try to buy everything but the horror is getting closer. I'm in a lazy Susan, how often does that happen? One more turn and I'll lose my stomach contents and then I won't need anything.

I take a climb up a street that says "Smrzlinu Ahead," but the houses on the street are all either empty or boarded up. I drift in the soccer field, watching my legs, looking over my shoulder. I fall for a pile of clothes that can hide me but are also very soft to lay in.

Another cruise- tropical, perhaps? Somewhere for coy adults, who shed their skin in Winter when their eyes start molting off. Someday I will place both hands into the ocean, I'll dream huge, and go swimming until I start to laugh. One day I'll sink to the floor of the bourn, maybe the same day I wake up and I'm not swimming alone.
Martin Narrod Apr 2014
I used to think that all of them were just bodies. She-figures, they came and went, facilitating infinite happiness and following with hellacious heartbreak, aorta explosions galore. They pass. I stay. She goes. I remain. We all take a trip, but she falls asleep while I follow the road, I sing the song, make the lyrics up as the 101 heads West, and I careen against the Pacific. I see silvery-white plumes of whale breaths spouting, they break the rocks of my rock and roll. When the levee breaks, we'll have no place to go- I'm going back to Chicago.

California. Line 5. Verse 1. She is born in Arkansas, in Denver, in New York City, in the back of a taxi cab, her parents waiting for a table at Earth Cafe, 1989. There are concerts, balconies, elevator shafts, and on benches. The gain rises, the volume up and up and up, I offer her a cigarette, I ask her if she likes my dress, I show up with two palms full of a flame, and I say hello. Browsing in high-definition, the water is warm, my feet are planted and I have everywhere to go. Classical emporium of light fill me with ease, greatness, and belief. She asks me if I'm gay. Every great confusion can be proven to be fortuitous with enough time on hand. I kiss in cars, in bathrooms, and barrooms, in hallways, on staircases, on beds, church steps, and legs. I touched a leg, ran my fingers through her hair, my thumbs curved to the height of two ears alongside a size B head. I love art *****. i burn candles, and I swirl the wax around until the walls wear masks of white. I check-in to a hotel. I stop to buy wild flowers on the side of the road, or to climb down a ravine, we open a page into an enormous patch of strawberries, wind-surfers, and the golden Palo Alto beaches. I am in Bronzeville, on my way to Bridgeport, I am riding the train, browsing magazines, and singing new songs in my head. My lips are wet with excitement and the musings of the Modern Art Museum and the gift of a first kiss; behind the statue on Balcony 2, near the drinking fountain, the Eames couch, and two lips meeting anew. Bravery in twos.

Chapter 1, Verse 2. The chorus is large and exciting. New plastic shining coats. Smocks patterned with the Random House children's stories that we played with as children. We didn't wear gloves, or hats, or pants, or our hearts on our sleeves. I was up to my knees in hormones and very persuasive. My fifth birthday was at the Nature Center, you chased me into the boys' bathroom and kissed me with your wet and four year old lips in the second stall from the door. I eased up maybe 2% since then. The speakers are a little bit fuzzy, it's like listening to the spit of someone's tongue cascade the roof of their mouth while they pronounce the British consonants of the 90s. Said and done and saving space.

I am saving up for Grace. A crush in the mid 2000s, black hair, long legs, and the only brunette for a decade before or after. We played doctor, with the electric scalpel we turned our noses red with Christmas time South American powders. A safe word for an enemy, the sun for an enemy too. You bolted out and took my early Jimi Hendrix Best Of compact disc case too. While we're at it, you took my Michael Jackson cassettes as well. I go mid-range, think Kiri Te Kanawa in the whispers of E.T.'s Elliot. Stuffed-animal closet party for seven minutes in heaven. Your family came with butlers while mine came with over-educated storage. A blue borage sky in the intestines of life, a splinter in the shanty-town of invincible daily struggles- both of us were born again in O'Hare Airport's Parking Level D. Too many nonsensical arguments in two-tone grayscale ripping open the packaging of a course about trysting in your twenties.

Your stomach's history is overpowering. It is temperamental, mettled by spirits and sleepless nights, borborygmus, wambles, and shades of nervousness you were never comfortable speaking openly about. The history of your ****** was privatized, in options and unedited films shot over and over candidly by a mini DV desk camera, nine months to read you wrong to weep in strong wintry walks back and forth from The Buckingham to the Dwight Lofts, Room 408 without a view. All of your secrets in a little miniature of a notebook, bright cerise red. You captured teardrops in medicinal jars meant for syringes. You tied strings to your fingers, named your field mouse Ginger, and introduced your mother as Lady Darling. Captain with stingray skin, the hide of Ferris Bueller with the coattails of James Bond, dusted with daisy pollen, and clearly weakness. You ate me like bitter herbs on Thursdays, and like every other woman I've ever met, on Tuesdays you always kept me waiting.

I have wings for everything. Yellow wings for a woman in a yellow dress, Red, White, and Green wings for Bernice from Mexico City, Purple wings for  Mrs. Doolittle the doctor who worked at Taco Bell, the Jamaican priestess who was traveling through Venice Italy- we smoked hash with the grandchild of James Joyce on the Northern pier against the aurulent statues of Apollo and Zeus, Cupids' collection of malevolent tricks, SleepingB Beauty's rebuttal in fending off GHB attackers, my two dear friends who were kidnapped in clothes, abandoned in the ****, and only remember eating chocolate donuts with sprinkles and the bruises and dirt on the insides of their thighs. Nothing clever. Nothing extraordinary. Everything sentimental, built to withstand soot, sourness, and early female bravado.

You know how to play the piano so you've said, but i only have the CD you gave me to prove it. I do have evidence of your addiction to men and *******. I have your collection of dresses with tags still on them (but every woman has some of those), there is the post office box in Kauai, the Halloween card from last November and the two videos I have stored on an external drive in a nightstand adjacent to the foot of my bed. You sleep atrociously, talk too quickly, and **** like your father abandoned you when you were five. Your talent for taking photographs is like your skill-set for playing the piano, but I don't have the CD to prove it. You don't believe in social media, social consistency, friendships, or hephalumps and woozels- with the exception of the classes we shared together in college, I've never seen you outside of the most glamorous of fashion. You hate flats, hats, and white wine, and for as sad as you can seem to be at times, I've only had you cry on me once. While we were on the phone, three days after your mother hung herself. That's when I last left California, and I haven't been back yet.

I love a Kristine, but once a Britni, a Brandi, a Joni, a Tina, Kristina, Kirsten, Kristen, and a Katherine and Kathryn too. I know rock stars who are my dearest friends, enemies who I share excellent taste in music with, and parents who've always had my back but show it in lashings of the tongue and of the belt. It's been two years and three states since I was two sizes smaller than I am now. I've never considered the possibility that I was the main character and not the supporting actor, but due to recent developments in antipathy and aesthete, reevaluation, and retrospective nostalgia. All of this is about to change.

I am me still evolving without my usually stolid and grim ****** features. i bare brevity to situations existing that would **** most or in the least paralyze a great many. There is one for every hour of every day, and one for every minute in every hour, second in every minute, and more than the minutes in every day. No one has a second chance, shares a different time, or works off a different clock. I have been called the master of the analog, king of the codependent, and rook to queenside knight. I share a parabola for every encounter, experience, and endeavor. I am three minutes from being a cadaver, one drink away from a drunk, and one thought away from being completely alone. I think upright, i sleep horizontally, and I love infinitely. I am the only finite constant i have ever known. I am the main character, the script, satire, sarcasm, and soundtrack are mine.

"I don’t care if you believe it. That’s the kind of house I live in. And I hope we never leave it.”
There's A Wocket In My Pocket by Dr. Seuss

— The End —