My Guitar’s Persona Remembers Everything to Do With Rainbows
String-driven box, sound hole embedded eye in black hole solar plexus. Chesty release valve that pranks in struck parallels, drug pearloid plectrum crossing pickets into chords, lockdown babybabble be damned. Ruptured mindless, I wear my love like a cloudburst. Carbon-footprint purifies the remote helicopter toy in the garage, so I take the submarine to work instead, then suffer open parentheses before skipping into full-blown comma. This poem makes a box. A cabinet of clocks missing their string-driven wings. My instrument Jonathan Livingston's bridge Seagulls me awake. If the wind is right, we float up, trace in the moon's ivory gears. Entire forests, cumulonimbus bodies mired inside mental wind to re-fructify substantial in our fingers. I mother him, and the lyric in our mouth digs the dirt that fills us. Lavender tea petals arrive on a breeze. In Jonathan, we pale Canadian, even if only for the border guard of bar- chords fingering our inlaid neck. Dreadnaught torso, buttercups in my arms, my coffin topped by a spray of daisies. Firearms don't interest us like the instrumentality of a sound box. Where soul meets body there's a race-car made out of faerie wands you can string out like a locomotive. This song is either about finding one's true calling, or death.
A Literary Life
Papier-mâché hearts rev your umbilical engine, their gush of syntax scorching the jet white sky expanding in your chest. A vibrato of woodwinds ghost Aeolian in the ivory blur of the conductor's baton. You score words onto staves, detune the orderly foundation of the universe, trust in the lavender breakers as they crash about your head. Letters of rejection hover massive above your first draft, and your house engulfs you like the twenty-thousand days since your arrival at this nexus, this circus of sidewalk chalkings. You revise this draft from time to time according to audience. After all, the grade-book is still open. And the piece isn't due until the end of your life, maybe the day before tomorrow. But don't worry, judgment broken into bands of vulcanized tread-life won't lose head to your final publishing house. Leave that to the sleeping tigers, the kindling editors pull from your various screens of static. The next draft dispels the erroneous inkling you're an actual person, alludes to music you've never recalled, kneels down to accept another dose of your self-hatred. And no one wants to rewrite that. Your book looks beyond you, doesn't buy into that whole illusion of self, anyway. There is no final draft, only the rain as it exhales the names of trees smothered to extinction, a whispering mist of summer truck tires swishing down the interstate. ___ Bobby Parrott's poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble, Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Diphthong, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. Wearing a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado.