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Poetry by Bobby Parrott

New and Selected Poems

After These Several Cups of Music
When you fall in love before starting a herd of Slinkys
down the up-escalator, don’t be surprised when the priest
at the wedding wears an invisible Bozo-nose.
We all wear clown-faces under the ones in the bathroom
mirror, especially for those last few seconds
before nuclear vaporization.

Bunny Love a Relic to Our Selfless Perhaps
Tiny children disguised as tinier rabbits have breached
the sovereignty of our circle of houseplants chanting
ad-slogans found only in lucid dream manuals. Wrestle
them all into the Cyclops of our broken television set,
plastic-click volume knob turned all the way up to zero.

Embryonic Structure of my Pseudo-
Brain’s Future Storybook Self
In the mouth of a cyclotron, tender rockets
are made simple. Can we ever touch real time?
When my breath smells like greased gears,
pregnancy can stop thirst like a rose gives birth.

Sometimes my Brain is a Monster
We can’t find the deeper creature me,
can’t recall the black hole left embedded
in the fabric of upstairs. I was built
by the uploaded lobsters on the phone
drinking Absinthe, an algorithmic
brew aged in icy casks of pure sevens.

Virtual Self-Portrait Cutting into a Watermelon
At least a pull-toy knows which way to swivel
its wooden eyes. So I sink down onto the discarded
church of the forest floor, oblivious
to the sneakered feet around me in the clearing,
and whimper the opening to my best cry,
hoping my new set of parents are listening.

Bobby Parrott

Up next "The Journal of Mary Gurney" by Nathan Perrin "The Swimming Pool" by Kim Farleigh
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