3 POEMS

The Solitary Countryside of What We Know

Your data-plume interferes with my substructure

in ways that transcend the runic engravings

on our collective hypothalmic oyster, cloud-bound

meta-cortical sentience-engines notwithstanding.

Which is to say in the evening, my house glows pink

for twenty minutes after the sun is swallowed

by the mountains. During this interval faces lose

their meaning and begin to wriggle off

their various heads to pinkly homogenous

tunnelings. Time is a series of sentences pretending

to be linked across a causality invented by sweaty

cyborgs filching neurons from this erasure of cliché.

So I take my near-death-experience out for a walk

in the field of diagonally-parked but parallel-thinking

landing strip commotion to relieve the orientation-

sickness of being impaired. And now your constellation

of giggle-triggers has corrupted the density-consensus

of my optic nerve, and I think I'm about to grow up. This

may be expressed in cellos burning, but my flinch-

instincts require more than this, though houses condensed

in their abridged states have no such alphabet.

Sensing the hem of a touch, my viscera's haptic motors

wend us thru deeper frequencies, satellite caverns

housing thickness, while the flute section runs fingers

through my tousled nimbus of notes. Is this how it is

that wealthy or mentally contagious, we solidify laughter

in search of enlightenment? The trap of irony springs

closed on my brain, intercepts your missile

of daffodils, data-plume softly-encoding substructures

into the sidewalk of my chalked hopscotch anomaly.  

           Smooching at the Cosmic Altar of Reality's Hibernation

Hibernating in the cranium of forgetful, certain concepts occur to this apparent me. The inner-tube of my life's story may deflate as mental time passes, but it carries me to the surface of my unknowing, and I flail. On TV, the adolescent Wednesday sugar-coats this when she proclaims to her colleagues that social media is "a soul-sucking void of meaningless affirmation." My vamoose from this plane conspicuous, I grasp the heart of my ongoing arrival's fragmentation. Like how my mother is my daughter inside-out for the sake of keeping them from realizing they're both me. You watch as I curl my toes into the most prickly-lizard likeness of this poem, and then meld with the apparent ones on the other side laughing until they hiccup like machine-gun peppercorns in a blanked-out parade of flavorings I've mentally invented. Like the chartreuse dream-world of frogs in their soft cocoons reciting sky, drinking starlight as if it were radio signals meant for them only. Light from home. The Dalai Lama says not to worry about enlightenment, that we'll each be enlightened on our death bed. But what of our dreams. Maybe our death bed converts into a quantum transport out of this cleverly re-minted yet counterfeit reality, the consensual concept of inevitability.

Polyphonic Color

the Pickle of my Ear

If you hear voices

in SETI's radio-telescopic rain,

the concepts of being born

will oscillate while you walk barefoot

across time. So if similes

are metaphors with training wheels,

then why is a bicycle pump

of purplish aerosol paint poised

like a porpoise over my release

button? Tubular inflation code?

Maybe we're all just zombies

in variable sleepwear. The acceleration

of robotics can be unsettling, but

my transplant to the hive-mind

of plugged-in art tells me it's nothing

but an immortality app

of nano-machine wobble-data

and never mind

that the noosphere's virtual cloud

uploads realtime children

at the rate of grape popsicles

from the jing-a-ling truck

cruising the neighborhood playing

Born to be Wild full-blast.

Because in my crisp cyborg pants

I now see death as a substrate of soundless

my smartbike Little Wing can only hum.

 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.