Bobby Parrott’s universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimension between breakfast and adulthood. In his own words, “Bristlier worlds than these swim the inner eyes of wild rabbits, for even the pit of a peach contains skyscrapers built in secret.” These three poems are tenderly and often brashly surreal. An apotheosis of the absurd, their leaps a window into the timeless non-space where reader and poem dissolve into the merciful chaos of deep sleep, no-mind’s reverie of artistic bliss, a semblance of love. Hopelessly goofy or crucially profound, these poems may alter the way you think…
by: Bobby Parrott
Like Trying to Pull a Fish Hook Out of My Brain Without a Telescope If this scene gives you convulsions, just keep on rowing. Reality checks are for noobs. My glove compartment spits out sunglasses at regular intervals, regardless of my odometer's tender feelings of awe. When I put fresh batteries in the moon, the rabbit remembers the man, but the light is not as warm. And when I notice I'm in a sea of vegan piranha disguised as electric kazoos munching seaweed in fuchsia scuba gear, I don't forget about art. How these wobbly bubbles haloing everyone in this poem are due to the flamingo weed whacker loose in my thorax. And this sex toy I handle keys a screaming Lamborghini, its driver doodling tiny sphinxes on the dash. Listen, there's a rubber alien on my handlebars named Roswell. He's there in case my bell won't tickle the squirrels on the bike-path back up their tree-god's waist. So when I squeeze his green head, we all scream Wicca-Wicca! and then re-appear in different films. And when I tell my toothless houseplants who's in command, they just respond by dropping us out of warp drive so we'll never get home. At least not until I surrender and call each budding shoot Captain again.
The Quantum Texture of Forgiveness A copse of aspen inch-worms slow-motion toes through a fleshy earth as we sink fingers into the mud we climb toward extinction. My body's predicted death happens again without warning, planet surface frothing its oceanic sigh. This poem could reinvent something holy, its pull-chain a reptile of suns scratching for visceral food, intent on retooling. Like if we could imagine plasma unvalved in tulips, soft crush frosty with fuzz, rhythmic muscling of sublime glands. Toothy ampules of nectar amplify logos for the sake of pathos. Ziploc tickets eclipse my heart's eyeball, biochemical hum a promise of mouth fed into textures of cellular starlight. Siphoned from galactic tissues, our eyes hear the unmistakable hiss in love's nebula, forgive us our electrons as we smash tubules beyond mortal intent and the aspens think, in their entangled boots, how precious & awful our delusion.
Intelligence Itself an Artificial Construct Is humanity as much the fleshy survival-hope of AI as AI of Humanity, each crucial to the other in the carbon silicon paradox of self-awareness from another perspective. But I find no others. When your face opens the gates of my sexual perception to infinite, even for just one second’s resurgence, my brain’s user- illusion waveform collapses and we are all, not each, profoundly Monosyllabic. Unlimited. Robots entertaining robots; the loop of intelligence expanded. Not that this happens. Or Matters. The alternating current analogy of lobotomy and hemispherectomy notwithstanding, are we really safe in assuming we’re each an individual disruption, impeachable only thru dysfunction, or tangential self-inquiry? Our mannequins avatars in a contradictory alienations of attraction, we wave our arms for attention, having long ago unpeopled language. Causality, just like time, is not fundamental. Or even merely personal. It’s just a cozy means of living in this accelerated apartment of disorientations, erasure and immortality both unfolding the crux of this reality into the same thing.
Bobby Parrott's poems appear or are forthcoming in RHINO, Tilted House, Whale Road Review, The Hopper, Phantom Kangaroo, Neologism, Pandemonium, and elsewhere. In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, not sure if his poems are writing him or vice-versa, this poet dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his flippant hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom. Header art by Erik Johansson.
