Bristlier worlds than these swim the inner eyes of wild rabbits, for even the pit of a peach contains skyscrapers built in secret

Poems by
Bobby Parrott

Absurd Vocabulary in a Spaceless Clockface Departure

Landscape of splintering steeples, this state of mind panoramas a distant convergence gazing into the bafflement that to see others is to imagine. To collect truth from metaphor is to see the metaphorical in so-called factual. Money is like that. The violence of thinking I’m identical to myself never threatens the symphonic certainty of evading emotions. Watch how the theme music fades in, and my brain’s train station stains its tracks with a harbinger of tenderness my horizontal lobes obscure. I was once lingual, but now less so. No language in endgame cellular. Like this poem’s apotheosis of the absurd, the far-flung fury I practice perceiving sinuous shapes in melodic contradictions, while the soft footfalls of my thoughts crunch little word-stones with each act of letting go. Lyrical houses, like the mathematical nets we throw over silence, pretend to contain mountains, but only deflate the crucial uselessness of deep dreamless sleep. Try to hold the reigns like you have a bird in your hands, like you’re cradling it, safe from harm. No sensical asylum survives this forgiving, this falling asleep, once you’re on the flight deck ready to find sense in the fiction of being a distinct person in a world of wobbling wordplay.

Love’s Lunacy a Rhythmic Persistence
Into the Sacred Puff-Ball of Thrum

If I listen real hard, I can hear a marching band inside me pulsing like a bell blaring in the tongue of trombone, thumping its brassy life out, each uniformed body clothed in a texture of notes swerving its swing of intervals, humping to the drum-major’s pump. She blows her whistle and their waves turn like the precision parts articulating a Jaguar’s engine. Notes in the frequency of that wide-spectrum hum of honey on the tongue. I memorize their shapes, inhabit the spaces between notes, climb the silence under the fresh-cut melody like a ladder, like the intentions of trees made visible in the twilit park of my viscera. The viscous slur edible, held over into the next metrical conjecture. Each color I sip on washes through its own campaign of Sousaphones, collusion of trumpets reduced to jets projecting nectar, a flower armored in the library of mystical meat until I dissolve back into a substance resonating another parade. The umbilical Andromeda galaxy flexes its arms into the churn, the fish bowl that is my pearlescent, organic shampoo. My body a maelstrom I will never unravel into objective. Is the delirious mystery love a lockstep movement into mindless, an inevitability?

Hard to Stay Fragile in the Goodbye Distance Between Us

My funeral home of imagination exhales its tightening mosaic of departures softly, tenderly, like the gentle chaos of an orchestra tuning in unison before the maestro raises her baton. Music’s mycelial tendrils, my timidity back in its velvet-lined case, I blare, the brass flare of my horn a pulsing metallic vibrato finding love in my inability to find love. I realize how belief gets in the way of learning, memory itself a friction of guesses smeared onto the surreal template of cerebral earth-life. The creamy candlelight behind my beloved’s front door losing time, a reversal of self. How we mourn in advance our loss. The philanthropy of letting go of this distinct organism we think. The involuntary monastery of my life’s sticker-bush tangle of no-meaning. This confession of poetry’s urge. A violet tincture transcribed into early decimals, increments of life remaining, their slip from my account into petals on a sunflower’s corona. The yellow rhythm of lavender as it crumbles into stillness, lensing the eye of the raindrop holding us. The fragile distance of you, more and more resembling the merciful deletion of sleep. That soft explosion of unknown we long for in our dreams. A bankroll of soft goodbyes.

The Heisenberg Principle
of Mouthing Popsicles in the Fridge

If not for the unknowability of quiescence, the fractal fungus of mycelial networks would still be merely the wrapper covering what we know. From globular galactic, we’re submicroscopic, down into Planck scale. But who ever said we were here in the first place? Randomly-generated incantations can be quite monosyllabic, where history and Astro-mycology’s filaments intertwine. And matter may be a figment of reverse entropy plugged in to the network of irksome. Or a sort of drug-induced psychosis of what seems so. The rounds of breath we take in this rotation of syllables feel less fundamental. Less succinct. To experiment with this dream. The Ouija-board warning a schism, an instinctive impersonation of isolation. Think of it. Bereft of the normative veils of individuation, who are we, really? Scholastic enquiry a vulnerable opening in the flanks of wonderment, the external world is a fragmentation of the inner, not the other way around. Thus I orbit, dislodged. My irregular head throbs with Popsicle brain freeze.

Bobby Parrott‘s poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Phantom Kangaroo, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Collidescope, Neologism, and elsewhere. He sometimes gets the impression his poems are writing him as he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado.

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