Five Poems by Bobby Parrott

 

Sweet Grass Woven Through

My Chest Like Manhattan Skyscrapers

 

White noise contains every past and future music,

just as mud embraces all things living. The constellations

inhabit me, generate likenesses, reshape my newest self

 

to open. Light has never been my worry, though I embody

the photons working each coded protein! This phase's

network of mycelial electronics, neural lattices unlearning

under the soil of our keyboards, sets neutrinos adrift,

 

quantum memories in charm-flavoured quarks. My lover

and I, nestled in the ribcage of hyper-molecular, beat together

the viral drum of star systems. Like inhaling the raw ocean,

 

the rush of breath inside the fall of a house. Hollow ideas

tremble in our hands. My bare feet sandy with soil

 

overhear the grass whispering through my toes. I push up                                              

on the moon so it won't fall down. A teaspoon of dirt

 

contains miles of mycelium fibers, a constellation of conscious

contacts in a Wood Wide Web. Does perception create? What does

the forest think as I walk its mossy floor? If I drink from the cup

of the forest's eyes, will I see God? Her event horizon spreads,

transposes this prose, leaves latent memory dirtside. Sweet grass

 

fractal thru my chest like Manhattan skyscrapers a constellation

we contain. I leave my immortality coupon in the back pocket

 

of my jeans and wash it by mistake, so thin galactic coordinates

blur to unreadable, like that curious tendency we call love.

 

 

                         We Take Laughter Seriously

 

Certain naturally faceted crystals store our most musical memories.

One might say it's oddly melodic, but her laughter is so jarring,

 

so dysfunctional, the entire school fears her. Even the birds stop

midflight to change course at the sound of her machine-gun syllables

 

and their perforations of sky. A frightening eruption. We're all freaks

of nature on this bus of worlds descending outside time. This too

 

is a duality. How we idolize binaries, populate categories. But things

flip apart when we open our gigantic scissors, gemstone crust bristling

 

invisible fringes of teeth poised to sever us from our previous

and upcoming selves. Ego's embryoyo string. Punch of years a trunk

 

we straddle as if to erase the cosmos in its corrugated convulsions. Ah me.

While I somersault sleep from the soundbox of my guitar, go wavy

 

as a moth rubbed clear in this wind-tunnel dismembering, countless

solar-systems colour hearts on each dog-biscuit-on-a-stick. My cigar-box

 

full of plastic army-men put down their rifles, unhook their grenades, pull out

their kazoos and mandolins and jam. Laughing-Girl wants to join them

 

but she's still way too prickly, especially when the plastic lieutenant dares

to fake the grunts and snorts of librarians' mudwrestling at the organ-donation-

 

club picnic. Laughing-girl's cadence of napalm bullets could soften the troop

to bubbly green blobs, or incite out-of-body grooves, a more pleasant weaponry,

 

but please, sing me that verse again that unpacks my Virginia Woolf module.

Scratch my H.R. Giger chakra right there, yes. A little higher. Oh, yeah.

 

Ukuleles

 

A fetish of blue-haired geeky girls

playing ukuleles, Aqua-Fresh

Pearl Drops teeth smiling boyish

 

phrases into air, chunky camouflage

to my superhero costume's resolve

 

of squeamish anaemia’s View-Master

3-D charm. A snake, that muscular

downslitherer a flex of ribs my desire

 

streamlines. I inhale an ambient music

Brian Eno says should be ignorable

 

as it is interesting. But who can

even spell my façade, much less erase

it in words? Death opens under

 

my clothes a built-in compass to help

me climb back up my unknowing,

 

the silent sun-star humming still

as our planetary system's eye,

chunk of hard candy liquefying

 

in my mouth. Violent monkey-bars

& swings poised on asphalt sandpaper,

catgut fingertips plinking a pizzicato

 

of boyish girls folding themselves in.

 

The Suitcase Logic of a Stuttering Smokestack

 

I flicker in and out of existence each hyper-nanosecond like a sequence of slow-motion replays masquerading the blur of a single episode. And yet your memories of me release the aroma of Jasmin tea. And time, that ordering mechanism in my head, peels plurality from the scene like a confession during a police investigation. I re-enter wakefulness, and all my words reprogram themselves into a flood of arbitrary referents. So that books, restructuring their protagonists as clouds, paraphrase their vapor like a boat relinquishes the shrinking pier of counterintelligence. Meteorology aside, a tropical storm dismantles the closet where I puppet my clothes, its wild music scratching at the latch of the third suitcase I disentangle for the trip. But then what the hell. Does this well-dressed audience sip from silicone flutes the moonlight left in tomorrow's bioelectric theatre of prosthetics? Observing them changes their false selves even without temporal surgery. What an odd relief to Photoshop my inspection of self browsing in time. When I unfurl the blue first-aid-kit's spool of gauze from grad school, my car squirms into the living room to consider this riddle, ratchets up to a new viscosity, wheel bearings performing a parody worthy of the wrench and hammer I clench for my stuttering smokestack's factory of broken doors. 

 

Robotic Shrubberies

of the Well-Weeded Mind 

 

Elliptical gibberish, elvish scribbles

of interbrain. Ponderous knobs

 

moonlight moves. Compartment

of my body's vast mouthing Mother,

 

whose terrible skeleton makes

from my plasticized linguistic masks

 

a receptacle widened to receive

this island's spiral, her bodily basin

 

of hysteria. A dog growls. Even

my offspring refuse to disassemble me.

 

Arrange them, attic fizz to Eiffel quartz,

and all they do is reverse. I mouth

 

the words, wave my hands. Build

boats. Teethe on the artificial

 

tires of my artificial car like it could

feel or taste the spherical horizon

 

of your peach-flavoured smile. Clouds

gather at my temples. I Shape globs

 

of illogic, upload delicate books. Light

peels between their leaves of words.

Bobby Parrott, poet, musician, lover-of-life, has obviously been placed on this planet in error. In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." His poems wildly appear or are forthcoming in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, their house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.