Bobby Parrott
HOW A TOY FIRE ENGINE THICKENS THE HOLLOW BEHIND EACH WORD
Death, God's crafty avoidance of adulthood, turns on its siren,
tapes dada art inside each stall of the Pentagon's restrooms to
tenderly mushroom every missile poised in its silo. A radar dish
senses frequencies otherwise disguised as uncrushed candy
ribbon. A neighborhood community of oblivion made to order.
Held fast in a tiny hand from Washington, the nation's empty
scribble box imagination strums a barbed-wire etiquette, unlaces
all the fear necessary to rationalize its ejaculation of bullets.
Missiles. A lathed hourglass flips on its high-beams as it smooths
my arrival in the terminal thru which my eyes draw light in this
corner of an emerald park. And do we find group prayer a
yearning plea for gallows humor, even though lanterns of sunlight
blow across honeysuckle flutes, unsmother our empty books of
their blankest words, breathe in a fence-work of rough-hewn
forest, dither in the farmyards of the yet unwritten. None of us
age, or kneel, but gift crowns of flowers to the ponytailed
symphony of cyborg palm-readers reclassified as riot police, other
people we'll ask about the early release of death.
Bobby Parrott's poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Phantom Kangaroo, Atticus Review, The Hopper, New English Review, 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.