Bobby Parrott

sometimes my brain is a monster

Can’t find the deep creature me,
can’t decode the black hole embedded
in my sternum’s wall. Was it bred

by the uploaded lobsters on the phone
drinking Absinthe, that algorithmic
prequel to this cryptic, elegant burn?

Meet my ego, the tender revolution

of fork-in-the-socket defibrillation,
this toe-tingler religious-libido device. Mind/
Body duple a blue spark, wind-up robot

solitude’s barbed wire induction coil
ranting the stuff of no-mind, maelstrom
a shortened slipknot we mushroom

like egocentric neckwear. Preliminary
chokehold of my edgy poodle-self between
cerebro-spinal slap-downs. Rebirthing

for non-believers? Moon-gravity church
where lightning response can rewire
open-toed dopamine’s purr in parallel?

Before breakfast kicks in, I throw a ceramic
cup thru the fuck-it window, even before
the coffee-maker burbles its clone of sanity.

Refuse to Play Human
Until the Very Beginning

The terrifying groundlessness
of self shoots spores, the puff ball’s
ejection spinning a fungal facade

of specters that digitize irony, mimic
a sunset-flavored comfort music licking
the worlds both more and less

luminous. Muscular contrails
stretch into microcosmic. Twist
the knob if you’re still not sure.

Feel light’s radial fins
channel the magazine’s sonic embolism
past my filmy portal. We’ve tendered

seven of yours. Let them go.
Put your linguistic double face back
into its protective case. Devolve

to unsnap this poem’s motor
from starfish dialectics. Contagious
eyes fall into disuse. We circuit

a body of transistors scavenging
faces from the cordless moon,
whose trajectory finds how sleepers

swoon to crunch open milkweed’s bone,
hilarity of our holiness smaller still
than your developing child-mind planet.

Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but for how long? This queer poet's epiphany concerns the intentions of trees, and now his poems enliven dreamy portals such as Tilted House, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Diphthong, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. He lives in the unceded ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Ute peoples now known as Colorado, with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.