These four poems by Bobby Parrott are gently surreal, their leaps an opening into a space where the reader and poem, or consciousness and art, may recognize one another as temporary approximations of love, and glimpses of the uncanny ‘Real’ may be encountered. Poetry allows words to sometimes become artifacts more than signifiers toward particular meanings, and texture may interact with sound and emotion on levels where individual identities no longer mask or oppress the freedoms we already possess but have forgotten along the way…
by: Bobby Parrott
Botany's Intervals Unravel in a Confession of Clarinet The musician wren in the maple outside her bedroom window awakens her with his version of Born to be Wild, the bird's syrinx spiraling kaleidoscopic trills of semi-quavers until a time-signature shift arises from behind the dream of its deep-green generator. Poet of touch, the woman sways inward, eyes a singular portal of self. She bends to click open the hinged case, twists together the segments of unsuicide to mouth the river of I am, of breath. That the world could contain such a thing as a clarinet– petite ebony tree, sprung plumbing into cerebral conduits working on the outside, handheld stalk, hollow sylvan conduit warm-fingered, drunk on forested air, woodwind of tessellation, intervals in a long branch of eardrum- sung light. Perish now the struck match of gunplay, or the mouthpiece of gloom a tone has traveled to become. The small bird comprehends its mother, carafe of moon sprouted leaves, down slipping under wood-smooth fleece. The botanist adjusts her reed, tickles articulation's troubling nuptial. Avian arpeggios arise from inside her column of air, augment the woodland's fractal fugue into a meadow of butterflies to confess her sonorous body.
Sensing our Mutual Morpheus in the Beginnings of Birdsong Let's synchronize our sundials, march toward an oblivion unknown to the gods who've pretended us alive. Bristlier worlds than these swim the inner eyes of wild rabbits, for even the pit of a peach contains skyscrapers built in secret. When I tell you we'll unplug tender trees in time, why must you then look at me like I've plotted to abbreviate your libido? The next thorny leaf of this artichoke called my life dips itself in the melted butter of my childhood. So which one of me does this? And how might love gain face? Pay more attention to the helicopters whirling outside your window, instead of acting as if our mutual Morpheus will ever pass Go soon enough. And know that we'll all be pulled through a nostril of the planetary head to be reassembled into far simpler landscapes of bliss. Who knew birdsong could lull us into another slumber? Squeeze your eyes shut until all the galaxies disappear. And consider this: If energy is our gloomiest illusion of spirit, why do all your yesterdays still run in packs? Our biosphere sighs its whisper with knobby treads that gasp under my bicycle pump's push, a singsong daydream inside my guitar. And again, birdsong. We crumple to the earth and lapse into another level of hallucination where gravity fluctuates like the weather on TV.
Womb, In Retrospect My suicide suit releases clarity from my human costume into a rampage of sestinas, though some days everyone looks like Captain Kirk, orders me to install droplets of my history into a retinal-scan reversal called my mother within me. I turn, beat my newborn drums into alignment, apologies artificial, mouth of a canyon unnerved between blank words made to refashion incomplete. I used to be her, but as this meta-virus regroups us I lapse, fall into slow motion, drop the cake I carried lit in hopes of covering the nothing she kitchens awry. Outside in the literary factory of luminous we geriatric infancies remember other umbrella wings, hide internal structure in the margins of a poem, (s)mother persona basemented, ample, enveloping.
The Strawberry-Blond Mechanism of Not the Baby Moon We Think Stirring from interstellar slumber the light-spun fabric you snuggles into its new artifice self to forget its sleepy avatar blinking wide, The Ancient One. Moonstone showers tongued out to a luminous tang, technological aromas settling in this theatre blinded by the thingness of science entangled particles, the illogic of late meta-quantum inroads you call irony. In fictions of mind, illusion's projector a self-conscious screen, losing itself, modulating its granularity much like the dreamer's mirage of characters in a film. So settle back to the one you've never lost. Don't be afraid to let go of loneliness. Just breathe.
Bobby Parrott 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 house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.
