mark parsons – 3 poems

Waking Up

To another dream
Dead,
With no place to go
Why not have some speed?
Don’t mind
If I do.
And I’ll make a deal:
I can’t hang out and join the cause,
But it’s double or nothing the next time around.

Don’t move, stranger,
Stay right
Where you are, until
Everyone
Looks like somebody else
And the present’s a euphemism for “code re-use.”

I’ve got to piss so bad, a tech from the ballistics lab
Will use the impact-crater to model the rifling in my urethra.

Saw on TV a committee was killing some franchise or other. 
For kids,
And maybe for kicks,
Too, I guess.

Except none of those people ever had any.
Kids, that is.

A little squeeze	
Of the trigger, a little spin
Of the chuck so it shudders around
In your fist.

All you want is to hear some flinty-eyed loner
Tell you it’s not his problem, whatever ‘it’ is, because, face it,
Nothing is ever anyone else’s, especially problems.
Even you,
You’re not even yours—problem
Or otherwise—
You’re just out on loan
To some guy whose mood and silences
Make our guesses
As good as yours.


Untitled

As we practice our ballroom dance
Moves on the roof of tarpaper
Painted white, our feet in a scuffle:

Combat boot
Rubber lug
Chunky soles

Stepping on
Steel-capped toes
Find no grip;

Sliding back
Quarter-moon
Bootheel prints
Wax and blur:

And the dip:
My head, heavy, drifts
Over the ledge,
And I feel myself crease,
Like a leather sap filled with birdshot.

He says…
Something about redemption,
Or getting redeemed—
Me, a coupon, or what I don’t know—

Then name-drops a breakfast cereal aimed at kids
          Like a water-balloon on the head
Of the childless, middle-aged feminist walking across
          The apartment courtyard below,
Who’s returning home late from her retail job in a shopping arcade:
          Anthropomorphized animal mascots,
Talking cartoons, a prize in the box: artificial coloring,
          GMOs, agricultural subsidies, high fructose corn syrup….
Chewable vitamins poured in my palm
          And a crushed-up time-released Adderall
Washed down with orange juice.

My cervical column hyperextended,
As tense as a bent-back flat stainless-steel spring,
Its arc of trajectory plotted by means of obsessively pivoting
Calipers set to a distance of gap like a thought
That repeated and crooked spaghettifies, working out kinks
Like a length of flyfishing Day-Glo filament
Back-cast into infinity, loosed from the spool of the reel.
No stars pierce the dark muggy night sky
Saturated with gold from low-sodium vapour street lights
That’s bleeding into the velvet-upholstered
Firmament, dusting the short dense pile of the universe’s indifference.


Untitled

Amid spikes in organized retail theft,
In a lull between,
The dry dirt of the desert heaves, erupts,
Hocks up heat from a thousand mineral-crusted esophagi,
Byzantine home to gophers and desert rats.
The harsh air abrades our moist human skin, a chew toy
For annular jaws disgorged by convection,
And bristly with sharp UV
Puppy teeth. Her eyes, robin’s egg blue
And cracked open,
Reveal the guys never saw
Nor heard anything,
And also broke the machine again

Sorry, brother, you’re on your own.

Twenty-years
Trapped behind
The demonic veil
You might as well be dead.
One year back
Your mask slips:
Urchin-armored eyes bat
Lashes mascara-heavy
Like tree branches black with rain.

My feet cut like stainless steel plow-blades
Through a drift of petals as thick as marshmallow fluff.


MARK PARSON'S poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Ex Pat Press, Misery Tourism, Bizarre Publishing House, and Dreich. His book of poems, Stills, was published by Southernmost Books in 2023. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. 


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