The Predicament of a Kiss
by Bobby Parrott

Your eyes in their green radial clock faces ticking
like tiny bombs, and I don't know how long
I can hold this moment before it swallows us
like the cataclysm of hunger it is. Nothing
in this bubble of time expires. Give saxophones

their savory laugh, Satan his umbral hump. Late
he spools his waves up your spinal column, sleeps

with the moon, unsolves the mystery collapsed
and rebuilt in music. I expand myself into some-
thing less complicated. My hands decorate lost
books into Byzantine nodes of cortical. Prosthetic
foreheads hum verses in the static of televisions

like immortality's private daydreams. Those blotches
of orange on the beach mean nothing but dragons

in their liminal fire. But rather than inhaling nirvana
from a collage of oracles, try this clear green syringe
of fictional. Carrots Debussy. The luminescence carved
on beetle wings a pleasure menu for the next bardo
despite my secret church-box coupon or its windows

full of light. Divination the predicament of a kiss? How
drugs pollinate their jasmine capsules trained at bliss

into what honey-makers extract from love, that other
bee-stung fairytale. Why mushrooms, as they postpone
their fruiting bodies skyward, never say always, even
in death. Your bottle-bottom glass heart as it wanders
the stage, shoots daisies into your final wreckage.

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Bobby Parrott's universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimensions between breakfast and adulthood. 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, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule of Fort Collins, Colorado.