In the shower, wrap your lips around a cold
mango-flavored popsicle until it goes fractal,
a slush sliding sideways in the warm kaleidoscope
of your mouth. Do this while your body surges
under the hot, mind-scrambling torrent—
the showerhead’s nozzled storm of sparks,
its bevies of neon bugs that fizz and transform
their subsonic buzz of volts, march in waves
from quiescent lips back through your scalp
cells, thighs, velvety big bang. The universe
expands inside your vessel of skin. Toes curl
into the molten star-stuff you’ve forgotten.
But do it in the dark, because your nerves
deserve this senseless swerve. Yes, perform
this thermal-inversion death-wish pretense
in childish innocence. Free those crystal swifts
trapped in your chimney, those lacy comets
circling your house each night who wonder
if you’ll ever glide home and feather your other
nest. Show them. Put on your thunder goggles.
Even if they paint the missiles already in the air.
–
Bobby Parrott’s poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, 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.