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Clade Song Left

Less Than All Furry Silences

The intentions of trees are a form
        of loneliness we climb like a ladder,
                while love is resentment in scuba gear,
     
my death blinking furiously underwater.
        Yesterday, my head was vast and hovering,
                but today you tell me it’s all up to my shoes?

I will avoid puncturing another stone, now
        that I know who lives inside. I’m innocent,
                but cumulus. The rainforest never told me
     
I was not welcome to the mahogany. Oxygen
        aside, I had the distinct feeling that its parrots
                were busily dreaming me into their blue ideas

of monstrous. My pants have emergency
        settings. They must be constantly adjusted.
               Still, complicated crickets texture me, brush
     
me with their electronic dashes clippered
        to bits by the clicking of chitinous robots—
                canned applause in the rub of Velcroed legs.

The staccato trumpets of a Sousa marching band
        tripping their high-stepping stars into a shredder
                in triplicate find this poem not wearing its poem
     
hat. To unpuzzle this, question death, unscrew left,
        then improvise a rhinoceros in charge of nosebleeds.
                My Sigmund Freud action figure strikes a stiffer pose,

sucks on its cigar, suggests I’d best submit
        to less than all furry silences.  My potted fern
                Fred agrees, since most smoking plants admire
           
only the bravest of trees. Unfronded humans, 
        beings of a much lower order, wear only words—
                spacious scribbles fixed in tercets. Spiral fractures.

 

 

 

 

 

 
Clade Song Right
Parrott

Bobby Parrott, from Baltimore, Maryland, has worked as a photographer, musician, and University English Instructor, receiving his MFA in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. His poems appear or are upcoming in Preface, Grubstreet, Spoon River, Landfill, Poetic Sun, Star*Line, Stick Figure Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere He currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule called Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with his house plant Zebrina, and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.