Sublivian Crockagators

with squinkulous winks to Lewis Carroll and James Joyce

Sublivian crockagators spliverously purling

Aslish and aslash into the floaming pream,

Besmirched and besnook with crustiferous knurling

Maliferous whackers on scabulous skirling.

Pronunciapation awrack and awrecking

Cohorting and snorting my deathwording flaggers,

Their hooksharp harpoonage and doomful deathclutchings

Splayed bestial blather tweenst pointiful taggers.

Methought with methinker, “How toothsome and dapple!”

While pinkskinned and blushing myselfdom did paddle

Away from those bumpassly gnashful reptilians,

“This pream seems askliver, though frumptious and flapple.” 

So I froglegged my rumpass acrost and askunder

With quickshoving waves of Neptunic Splunder

But like a turtle in glueygunk stuckered and muckered

My delicate pinkskin felt gashingly plundered.

The fierce crockagators swaived lumptiously loppin’,

When hand over jowl I ran glop to the stoppom,

My crapulous flabules proved snackerly vista,

And my snufferly thumper thrummed “bunktummy-bunkem.”

Then the snidger-snadge sneer of my spoilyboned brother

Came thrashedly clear through my rumpled-up cover,

Behated beskated we'd slung and bumpchumpered,

Though most of our fisticuffed bloodwagon lumpered.

My dreamdreaded crocks croaked agog and vermoosened.

Besides, the crustiferous knurling was loosened.

But long by, our sniffley and quiffley big sister,

Sublivian crockagators n'ere splivered farsooken.

The Painting

The painting’s deft brush strokes sculpt

Textures of late-day gold on green panels

Two dimensions of a kaleidoscopic prism,

A false facade that takes me off this wood floor

To drift from meaning and time and find

Another way to stand within my mortal frame.

Leaving the fragmentation of my calamity

On a music quieted by its waves of light,

The rendering of a simple yellow wall

Nestled among the faceted cityscape

Draws me out of my crowded seclusion,

Calls me from behind its pigmented surface,

And like the dimming of late orange sunlight

Deflected from the roof-tips into the blue horizon,

Descends into a coal-grey sea of knowing fish

To ponder the coast and its lapping lover,

The sublime light still fusing its children in glass—

The painting drinks the space inside my eyes,

Light of unformed image not yet corrupted

By the gaunt and failing spinner of the known,

And evaporates, as its empty stillness interrupts

This relentless falling for just one more moment.

Threshold

            

          Like two golden birds perched on the selfsame tree,

            intimate friends, the ego and the self dwell in the same body. 

            The former eats the sweet and sour fruits of the tree of life,

            while the latter looks on in detachment.

                                                                                    —The Upanishads

It begins, tiny hot seed of the burgeoning flower,

The morning glory of my hemorrhage blossoms like fingers

Peeling back layers of life's pain misperceived

Blanketing my vision with stars, velvet black birth.

I never thought it would feel like this,

Sitting in the back row at my own funeral gathering,

My old friend Jim sputtering over imagined sharing,

Telling my story to these stiff, nodding heads.

"And then there was the time we drove around

In my father’s Chevy stealing flowers from gardens,” said Jim.

Wasn’t he going to tell them about the darkness and disgrace

We unearthed in the casket-plush interior of that big Caprice?

Or when we, with three friends and my birthday cake

Ate it all with our bare hands, gooey, chocolate-smudged, laughing

Like our heads were on fire, until we cried in drunken reverie

Because we were each secretly lonely and afraid?

And how we talked about death’s big doorway, whether it would be

Blackness, or blinding light in the fast funnel of racing retreat,

Or tickly tendrils of miniature scampering naked angels?

Would he tell them what we said about our dreams?

The golden bird that had been silent for a lifetime

Now flutters forward to share the branch with the impostor.

They pause on the threshold, one eye forward and one back,

Leaving the branch, the two birds one.

Robert Parrott may have been mistakenly transmuted into this culture. Placed on the wrong planet in error? Parked diagonally in a parallel universe? He is a Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert has dedicated his energies to collecting experiences beyond even his wildest imaginings. Touched deeply by art of various genres, amazed constantly by the creative spark, daily experiences convince him that the universe is anything but 'random'. One thing he knows: There is absolutely nothing to fear. Ever.