Pandemonium Pieces

Written by Noel Martin

Personal Essay

Time, July 4th

I had remembered the quiet. I had remembered knowing the stillness was what would kill me in the end. Everything had mattered; the bed sheets smelled like a kiln, fickle. Grossness watered me down into a sinkhole, I could barely pass through a wall without it wicking off my panties. A date to look forward to, earned but not savored, I felt I had wasted myself on my own humorous nature. I had remembered not feeling kept, or clutched onto like a child’s hand in traffic, or something jade-like falling into grass. I slept with a mirror facing my mattress, I studied how I pleased myself, ate food, I wrote nothing about me; only about humors and deadbush, facing glass. Curiously, you could tell on the days where I loved myself and everything inside, just by my cuticles; they haven’t grown back in 33 days. I think to write now about me and everything inside maybe because I have misplaced who I ought to have been. Time ushers me back to bareness, even my humors have put on masks in effort to sway me. And then, I hear the water running. All I become is the water running and I had been unsuitable enough to forget I am the one who turned the faucet leftwards. It is a muddle of my bloody footprint, watching happy pasquinades on the television until I had remembered to walk my body to the bathroom for urination and pills. I have hardened myself into a motor vehicle, I roll into road like boulders and vultures, I stink of leaf and steam, I can even drink gasoline through my beaver.

I sat and wondered how long it would take until they knew I never knew anything, about anything at all. That I was a fixed persona of what I thought I could get away with; I am disgusting. I am vile. I used to believe I would never know myself, but I do, and only I am able to know. I stretch out my legs and arms like a cat, my hips close into itself and I finger around the bedsheets to find my panties. I find instead a crumbling composition notebook once used as a coaster for red wine. I flipped through the pages, lit myself a cigarette without opening the window. I found a lock of my fringe trim taped to a page, and dated, but I forgot to write the day. The whole month of May found in between my discarded hair strands, thicker than what I pulled out last August.   

I feel that the wind shall change me. Blown into another proportion that isn’t yet, but will come. I used to deny, or feel sorry, for knowing that checkerboard sized pieces of myself existed in the shadows and glitzes of the people whom I left behind. And now having become glued back to them, besides the distance, I realize I am outgrowing it; faster than the sun, losing hours in the days that heighten and haze me. I smoke till I feel nothing vain, I am lengthening the shortened bits of me which have scattered through New York. 

I woke to an immediate spell of writing. I've been teetering with the idea of going to mass, on a weekday so I can miss the Sunday crowds and I never owned anything beautiful enough to wear to a Sunday mass. Some say God says come as you are, but not without bleeding eyes. I used to cry at the feet of holiness, bowing my head to white light hovering over my hair like a moth.   

I drank chocolate milk at 2am because I missed my father.

LSD, April 28th

Back. Back on my back again, My jewels are in the box 

Running out of silver from seizing slippery line’s sediment, citified footprint akin to the serious and unserious seeming to be chivalrous open eyes sealing the sky’s bottom grudge 

                                                              gaping size and sequence, saccade to serpent

scintillating stars for syzygy, sickish           

                                              spheroid              (just outside of sodomy)

whitewater from groundwater river,                          blood water wet from sick water,        scaling        second hand teases un-becoming of; un-beloving of stridulation or my sluggish bent sleet         slicking painlessly over my wet white sop of stillborn sleep, I am still a heat wave 

Water , grass , suspect , ice , static , radio silence , dust , tapestry , working men , fallen , faded , fear loathing , consequence , gust , given , water , river  begging , better , coining , flush , coming , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , storm , dry , caress , rain break , confusion , missing day , must , will , razor , rider , am , are , too , right , flicker , turning , leaning , altar , crest , rest , aren’t , fire , poison , wheels , wells , winter , fire , casted , fire , oil , fire , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , oil , panel , grieve , gorge , god , October , is , dead , heaven 

heaven 

my eyes would still be closed, waiting for you to tell me a story

not mine 

trick of the bag

Horus’ eye 

red fatigue             

                                   Gloss and trellis 

Split by blade of grass, I sink

I ate a part of you/ I think -           white heat-           

                       running to breeze 

Phantom,

      or shadow

             stripping

                 gone sideways and aping 

Hand gone through thigh 

I crease my cheek on your leg 

Rousing

     rising

        gossamer lakes and gallows 

Blue carpet

                                            Pretty slip

Everything in its right place. Sat at a table. Fast country of the moon, hissing over candle shadows and grey snow- sagacious psychopathy, hangering contentment. You are waiting for me to notice you left your dinner on the stove. I served you coconut cream and rum, then watched as you paused the television screen; vacant anecdotes of beautiful women, you placed a fishbowl over my head. I liked maintaining the ability to see, through glass, light dissolved into other smaller knuckles of light resembling tejas or prabhas. 

I walk with a wobble with the fishbowl on my head. I walk with a stolen body. I run with stolen legs, I love and hate with a stolen stomach. Eyes that came with an entire other life before mine. I have a t- shirt that smells like grass and sweat and disgusting things, but it’s soft, real cotton. And warm, when I hold it close to my chest I can feel a heartbeat. I have never worn it, a stolen unnamed space between my arms and throat. I go to bed with a t -shirt. I’d rather drain all the extras of me, what I never meant to pick up, right into the fabric, unbuttoning my skin into threads.

Blue carpet, I waver inside of blue, the part of you I ate, and spat out onto the floor. October is already dead, already gone to the ground. I am still a heat wave.   

Have you ever seen the counties of Southern California in a super bloom ? 

Rain rages in a quiet night

I pray for rain every day for every light seen from open windows rolling in fog and steam

Honoring a dry sky with wishes for it to change and drain its watering eyes onto the land that cradles my skin 

She brings her flowers when she’s stopped wishing

I laid below her and whistled a song I used to sing to myself when I wished to forget

I replaced my silver with gold, because of how the sun kisses me down my neck 

I can identify each freckle on my nose with a city or town, backroad river, grandmother’s house

I count it, all of it, all at once, using the same wind and gust that pushed back at me for wanting to enter the ocean with my shoes on