It's This Easy to Become a Child Again
Bobby Parrott
The Earth, perched on a tentacle of the effervescent Milky Way, tilts imperceptibly on its
adolescent axis, thinks of where it might go, outside the sun's tenacious pull. And yet you
look at me with those Jesusy eyes, the invisible eye-jitzu moving thru me, your jet pupils
the doorbell to adulthood's fall. I swim to the event-horizon of this black hole, gasping
rainbows like a caught fish drowning in air. Yes, storying the world into existence is a
secretly powerful game. A sense-making that backs the car out of the garage without
opening the door, driving the door-topped car to work. The door is my sense of wonder
that's lost its grip, that's off its hinges, but not for so long. Which way forward? This
reversal of evolution, portrayed by semi-quavers in the title track of the latest album by
Rumble Bunny and the Hypnotic Hamsters, "The Land Where Nothing Eats Everything,"
shows us how the irreducible gap between what a thing eats and how we dissolve riddles
headlong the bunny-phone of our most anthropocentric illusion. Which is to say, oh
darling. Like the synchronicity of the uncanny itself, our temporal mother in us pulls the
levers, and the Talking Heads want us to think they're more than that, though I've never
thought much about how to grow one. The curve of rain, my hatless brow a likeness of
Frederic Nietzsche's miraculous mustache, I imagine my teeth folding in to accept your
sudden cloudburst, impersonate the incessant fantasy of my face getting softer and easier
to resemble. When I fall asleep a doctor of Philosophy, I often wake up inside the next
head in this painting, drive my car up to the attic, sink airplanes into the soft floorboards
to awaken the clouds floating under the house. I light candles, make toast while immersed
in a crocodile tub full of linguistic water. But please don't worry. Death will only ever
reformulate this infantile box of worldviews, and where's the fun of being afraid of that?
Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but for how long? This queer poet's epiphany concerns the intentions of trees, and now his poems enliven dreamy portals such as Tilted House, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Rabid Oak, Diphthong, Neologism, and elsewhere. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.