Outside the Timeless Reverie
of My Clock-Body’s Dream

My clock walks round the hours
on its hands, clicks its switches
in a chest full of springs, considers

poems you will never hear. Deep
dial of dreamless sleep, this tyrant
eats the space inside words,

unlocks a paradox of metal doors,
does not mind its own business
but strikes the head of my match

into a robotic likeness. Cogs grind
their teeth. Filigree hands accelerate
my face, chime aloud each turn’s

vertigo, my street-façade’s casing
a clock-faced time-bomb ticking
and clicking. Wanting and waiting.

Doors jerk wide, trip me unwilling
past this box of skin’s salivary vehicular
lick. Pavlovian hooks jam my works,

disrupt my mental movement again
’till I fall back, then spring forward
into glass bubble sky, head full of death.

The Aerosol Train as it Swallows
Our Box of Vanishing

My smartphone reaches for me in
its electronic pocket, shakes its click-bait
face and considers. When neutrinos pass
through the jelly of my aqueous humor

their millennia of travel unravel
in sync with that school of neon-tetras
who turn simultaneously to bump
their noses on my latest copy of you,

which gradually absorbs the metallic
blue of their parallel stripes. Sub-liminal
frenzies aside, do slaughter-house pigs
dream of diamond machine-guns

when their most influential floatation-
devices have grown past corpulent? I shove
these thoughts into the lockbox clock
of my other octopus, again swollen shut

in the ever-spidering pace of tomorrow’s
technology. Yeah, whatever. And why must
I always feel so disgustingly appropriate
in my smiling-monkey pajamas? You ask

me this, lounging feline snug in your lunch-
box pose. But in this hall of beaver teeth
I fantasize warm toaster waffles drenched
in corporate meetings of artificially

flavored maple syrup, and accept a flock
of disgruntled androids who stalk me
as if I were theirs to love. Who would care
if my organic interface catches fire?

My Father’s Black Ukulele

My dog has fleas, and thru the catgut-ribbed sound-hole
in my father’s childhood nuke, an ironic pentameter
of talkative mimes. Mathematicians crouch low around
their campfire of gently burning primes, find a future

enjambment, a tug from the past. A child’s pull-toy-clock
eats its wooden hours like sheets of sunlight fixed in shafts
of rain. Relax. Just allow this ocular anomaly to define

what happens next. Do the math. Breast-fed stepchildren
face another blindness as love crosses the mirrored lens
of a kiss. Baby aspirin’s pilfered mouth of synthetic orange

infra-reds real fruit trees. Whiffs of virtuosity mother
their own tangerine-numerical locomotive. I’m apt to score
this musical in ballpoint Crayola, my algebraic father’s}
late-night dining room table discourse for me a seldom-

untold fiction, black ukulele ledged hollow on the mantel-
piece we grew up under. Is this how he death-beds me
into the next parental planting? In a jacket of forest-spun
toy dirigibles, he redlines my respiratory glide, synapses

ambitions I was never born to father. And thus we snorkel
organism, pollinate our tablet of sex, derange our zoom
rooms to malfunction, find other seismic snippets to plink.

Time Ticks in the Majestic Colors of Crayons,
Which Is to Say, However it Damn Well Pleases

Leave it to humans to investigate subatomic particles
by accelerating them to near light-speed only to smash them
together head-on in a Sledge-O-Matic roar of testosterone.

I pedal my amniotic bicycle counter-clockwise
until my incandescent suitcases snag clouds entangled
with unzippered volcano fragments drifting clerical.

Even though college scribbled me awake, my parts spin
faster in a blender flipped to high speed, reminding me to edit
my infomercial for timeless clock-swallowing. At night

I dream about not dreaming so I’ll dream during the day,
hoping a cross-consensual slice of life’s purpose
forgets to take its ultra-marine migraine lozenges. Outside

the reverie of my clock-body’s infusion, I rummage
in the theatre of my lunchbox unconscious, find a tarantula
sewing my mouth open to suggestion. The peeling away

of my history releases a Jesoid toxin, neuro-chemically
linked to sensible and yet televised theories of time’s untethering,
a wonder clicking its febrile ticks of pseudo-silence

until the future again erases the virginity of my head’s cracked
casing. Like how this box of coloring-book finger-paints
orchestrates its ongoing ambush of misconceived adjectives.

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.