***

Military Aviation
a Coronation of Tulips

To click how I think this, how
wrist-watches see time differently
from fighter jets, which can

hug alpine slopes close enough
to snag ski-lift cables.
A cracked crystal defacing
a pilot’s flight panel
makes less of an excuse.

Don’t change the answer. Imitate
bliss in ten words or less. Tip
the mission into its lantern of tulips.
Mirror the dust of twenty

translucent words. Families
undone as aspens waver

in the contrail’s sonic wake, leave
cupped hands open
to suggestion. Must we
stand empty outside

a house burned down, strum
the Sun’s corona, fusion’s other
hard floor? Peregrine 7
to base, crackles the voice
in the static. Uh, Sir…

***

First Trans-Broadway Run of
Brain Cells in Gumball Machines

Melting my head at the zipper factory
is more than just a religion. It’s a rejection

of the sarcastic letters I write to myself
that come back unopened. By this I mean
post-structuralism makes an author
into a lizard flexing its tail out through

a desert oasis incarceration. Helping
gravity push when it should pull,
planetary curvature an awakening

cars skid into inside us even after
literary drunkenness changes the bulb.

A musical form of geometry, a typewriter

of kittens left by my front door flinches
before a storm, the mad train station

of my father’s ghost belches black smoke
in its stainless enormity, calling for
bassoon parts in the musical. God comes
down, takes off Her clown face, opens

Her mouth and howls like an egg
until all you can do is make phone calls
in the vapor trail of lines left unsung.

***

Bobby Parrott’s universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimensions between breakfast and adulthood. In his own words, “The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder.” Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule of Fort Collins, Colorado.