A poem is a glandular dollop of plastic tail-light, a psycho-chromatic incandescence performed in a Tinkertoy car-park. A medication medicated and pickled into the lubrication of embryonic presidency, the polyhedral cube-root of mooncalf Pythagoras. A solar system in my mouth drifting twelve miles per second toward the constellation Hercules, haloed by the dark fluid world in my amniotic sac’s nebulous walls, the journey into everywhere from nowhere. The tabletop pumpkin of love’s balloon. A poem is the babyhood of a senescent symbolic order, a propeller-head mindstorm that never renounces pretense’s pretention. Maybe my ballpoint Crayola needs sharpening, but a poem is our ticket home, in a blue ticket way, like hearing a marching band in the refrigerator’s hum, realizing it’s been there all along, trumpets scribbling their crisscrossed wires into oblong window treatments. Or the claustrophobic madhouse of skipping breakfast for the sake of repressing the telepathy of vicarious houseplants. I mean, Niels Bohr said the opposite of a profound truth is also a profound truth, so a poem may be something more than mere gravitational lensing, the flickering distance steadily striking the nameless chevrons of psychedelic automobile badging. But one thing is sure: A poem is a jacket you can wear to your own funeral that won’t make your friends think you’re serious in that telescopic bowtie.
Bobby Parrott was obviously 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 Spoon River Poetry Review, RHINO Poetry, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Poetic Sun, Clade Song, Rabid Oak, 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 called Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his houseplant Zebrina and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.