by Bobby Parrott

Bassoonable Nostalgia a Clear Silence Under the Noise


In my less-than-ferocious attempts to avoid the shoulds of wishing things were otherwise, what often trips me up is language. I mean, shouldn't there be a shorter word for monosyllabic? And then there's palindrome, which should itself be a palindrome, right? Or phonetic, which should be spelled the way it sounds. Language makes me a slave to the arbitrary whims of info-bot algorithms, like how the double-reed flavors of pickled herring, caviar, and anchovies can gag me.

My clock dismantles its silent scream-fest of mainspring shame, until writing about love is like clenching about death, that shrill pickle complicating birth. Delivery room and cemetery, each advancing at velocities unknowable because of linearity's puppy-like single-mindedness. It's not like it's the end of the world, says Placebo, only the end of the human species, global warming an ultra-slow nuclear sling-shot that will spring us from poorest up. Maybe luckiest up. 

Between what things are and how they seem looms a sinister abyss outside the world as we create it, though we're all made entirely of non-essential beings running together toward a shared entropic mind, the experience of cosmic wonder a wink, a tip of the hand not meant for us as we think ourselves. I mean, how can we "pay it backward" when we're stuck in this lockstep time's metastatic funhouse delusion? 

So until the wintergreen sparks of who I am rattle open the sky-cage contrivance of collective defibrillation, the instrument by which we doom doom, we'll find that to postpone doomsday merely dooms doom for a doom in an eerie cartoon. I am you. And here crawls my miniature world, its toy-tractor satire a little engine blowing bubbles instead of crooning at the moon like its prenatal self always televised. 

   

 


Different Ways to Fall


What if every day
Earth's gravity fluctuated
like the weather?

Would there be days
where there was no gravity
at all in the forecast? 

What if a court sentenced me
to death by jumping
50 stories to the ground?

Could I do it on a very low-
gravity day and survive? This
really happened, in a dream.

I asked my Uncle Dick, physics 
professor at the Naval Academy, 
how to achieve weightlessness 

without sending a ship out
into space, and he said: freefall.
An airplane full of people

powers upward until it stalls 
and falls back to Earth. Everyone
onboard enjoys a Zero-G swim.

Einstein described gravity 
in a thought experiment 
where we're in an elevator

going up, and so I wonder, 
could this poem go centrifugal 
to adjust for inertial impact?

Today's Forecast: Childish
with a distinct chance
of unexpected moonlight.



 


Going to the Movie After Reading the Book


My rods & cones in their eardrum-tinted transmissions shadow the cave's wall and we marvel, another girl's fretted and banded neck supporting two opposing faces turned inward. Lenses permeable in the surge of photons, chlorophyll thickened in each cup of heavy light, inertial velocity incalculable without the photosynthetic ballet of non-self. In meditation, we help consciousness remember itself as it sleeps. Which means my memory is never as deep as my forgetting, even if learning is only remembering. Ego is when consciousness ignores itself for the singularity's event horizon it can never cross. The interstellar bureaucracy of mind we call self is mere quantum-entangled human wetware out for a momentary jaunt. And this cinematic platform earth-life firewalls us in duality until death-do-we-remember plays to the huge crowd of empty theatre-seats a digital simulacrum of semi-sentient, sub-Turing sunshine reduced again to the wan starlight of illusion, movie projector bulb gone out. 





 
No One Cares About Tomorrow 
from the Center of a Thunderbolt


My hair’s Aeolian harp seizes breeze 
from your smile’s hidden teeth lost 
in quirky curves, moonlit edges alive

in words washed delicate. An electrical 
flavor. Metallic rumbles unbolt a convex
monogamy, art’s lens, liquid hydrogen 

taken on for another irrational crack 
of erudition. Like what starlight becomes
at its retinal destination. Coded blips
 
of recalling. Galactic factories fall asleep
to explore the slender membrane of now. 
And this blue mushroom cloud’s apex
 
on my meditation altar, spores floating 
in air. What’s seen behind closed eyes 
cracks the sky open. Mirage coming home 
 
a paradox in static electricity’s arc
across the flesh, our ancestors intrusions 
of sharp explosion, senility unspoken
 
by trees in this hypnotic buzz of cyborg
code, straining inside poetry’s sprung 
loop of clock– electrons fading into one.
 

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.