THE GREAT JELLYFISH UNIVERSE UNDULATES ITS BALLOONING TENTACLES
Mathematics, one way we snuggle up to shadow,
outstripped again by the never-my-always lensing
of what's underneath. Unable to see flaws
in the cosmic microwave radiation background
of childhood's forgetting, we reflect our selfhood
head-on, transdimensional. The surface tension
in Neo's mercurial mirror, a viscosity we feel
like the pixelated rhythm of love's misinformation
animated into holographic reversal, my practice
rewilding this music none of us can hear. I see
my ego as a poem, a stranger conceived in wounds
inflicted on my mind's gelatinous limitation,
this mollusk in grave exoskeleton. Like trauma
leads to art we use to drive intention, gravity
irradiates my filaments, surfs my cerebral surge.
A surface story fragments collapsed thought
into a catechism of scholastic bones, curvatures
not made literary in gravitational wave theory.
If you ask me while I'm dreaming, these worlds
write new opening acts for the universe. Time's exit
formless, my body as seen from the edge
of the Great Jellyfish Mind. Its tentacles heave in
an unconditional headlong rush of forgiveness,
the prize-box purr, merciful killer of every organ.
Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but for how long? In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." His poems appear or are forthcoming in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins Colorado, where he lives with his partner Lucien, their top house plant Zebrina, and a flippant hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.