Two Poems
by Bobby Parrott
Reflections on the Prosthetic Asymmetry of a Cyborg Kiss
I no longer fractionalize the faces of people I’ve not forgotten before now. Everyone
bridges never with forever, and the real price of sanity is a sort of hypnosis challenged in
the quiet reverie of the electrocuted punch dispensed by the host of this earth-party
called post-human-life. I drizzle my uncanny perceptions, engender the sounds of
pristine windowpanes splintering into shards of dream a kiss leaves upon awakening. I
flatter the mind’s gravity, sit up in bed, gape at the deafening blood in the roar of a
squirrel’s heart, the vast eternity between thoughts, push like a fusion engine to heave
this city-sized starship on the voyage of identity’s loose facsimile of unanimous, incubate
electronics in a lapsed maelstrom. When even a supercollider slows its leading face for
me, I jettison particles, accelerate wordings. The scent of your hands as they look
forward to their previous body, a space without dimensions, an earth without its
biosphere pending, still holding me in its tender blue hands. This bullet-tipped hard-
candy-frog-on-a-stick a harbinger, a sugary river of liquefied flavor as it cascades the
senses, both breathless and reflective. Think bees humming in the middle of a flowering
linden. Like the wetness of sound from a nickel-plated spigot. I lather awareness into
objective experience before pulling moonlight from the nipple of desire. To meta-
copulate is to be, from the smell of a rose to a spiral galaxy wheeling thru us on the way
to its next demise. Like how I start anywhere and get everywhere. The world, as it
obstructs love in whispers beyond the ones in my mind. And already the strawberry
moon, in its vaporous form, sounds more like its own sequel, a sensual soup sipped hot
from its slurping saucer to fill each drowsy mouth.
A Cyborg Confession
The planet of my head contains only so much empty space. Its atomic non-structure
automatically attunes my central nervous system’s moonlight climate, and has
permission to read the various afterlives I’ve collected along the way. So go figure. My
gift to you, then, dismantles a translation of the changing forms of clouds into an atlas of
my simulated organs, the ones still pretending to play parts. I’ve placed us all at risk by
troubling your mirrored hallway of heroes heroically posed to save our child, the Earth.
My geographic tongue maps our future collaborations, while as an astronaut of this
topsy-turvy paradox, I membrane certain decontamination protocols, and this breach in
my screen catches most of the light between yesterday and a thousand next weeks. As
historical revolutions rise up to implicate me, animations like the secular magnetism of
consciousness lapse into sleep mode, because really, this quantum poetic entanglement
must, as always, electrify further its upmarket festoonery. Radiating spiderward thru the
dystopia of my current mind worlds this asymmetrical self from aimless emissary to the
loose and sleepless clinician working my ego’s muscle. So we pump molecular, doctor
the metronome of incoming data, long for the corpuscle of pre-damaged earth,
figurative as that now appears. And the quantum transistor beeping behind my eyes
envelopes the aquatic dream of this telepathy, multi-species medicine the last nothing
loaded into the chartreuse vessel known as Donna Harraway’s Lightship. But hey, what
did you expect?
Bobby Parrott has obviously been placed on this planet in error. In his own words, “The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder.” His poems appear or are forthcoming in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. He currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, their house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.
Cold Signal 