Bobby Parrott

The Scandalously Sandaled
Raincloud of Yesterday’s Self

I wake up in the bath tub
and recall how I’ve only washed
in words, as if your slippery
syntax was not tracing daisies
onto my biblically hygienic

shape. Some Romantic Tongues
make Time wear the same word
as Weather. But the sandaled feet
of this concept showerproofs me
further into the temporal soapiness

of my spatial cucumber center
like my dog chuffing at the door
in his frenzy for who knows
what. Which pickles the scene
a faded twilight monochrome

and I think, in this noösphere,
has tomorrow’s yesterday
never come? I twist, pull up
my dictionary’s luggable brick,
flip open to my tessellating

robot-face picture gallery,
and ask my hyper-quantum robotic
assistant Nordstrom’s locomotive
brain what my newly-minted self has
undone, sutra sunk in moonful tub.

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Today My Name is Quixotic Window-Box,
Whose Mirrored Leaflets Glassily Bristle

But yesterday I was less. Birthday death-bed
party of one complete, I’m entangled, a photon lost
in a moonbeam. I open my mouth, try to speak,

and a tiny man steps out, writes all my previous
names on the board. The whole class clatters

when he chalks up “Nordstrom,” my robot name.
The untold unfolding of this next segment

creates a new rule my spring-loaded anatomy
injects into its vision of ordinary scholastic life,
though when scrutinized, even the heartbeat

of a squirrel is a roar none of us comprehends
more than our forgotten omnipotence. But if
you think of this poem as a job interview, collar

so tight your temples pound, the questions fade
into something less elephantine than blue,

our moment here the sound of grass growing
on the rooftop of a novice billionaire’s high-rise.

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Bobby Parrott‘s poems appear or are forthcoming in RHINO, Tilted House, Whale Road Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Phantom Kangaroo, Neologism, and elsewhere. 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, this writer dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.

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