The Book of Never My Always, Overdue

My Bible spits out Republicans brandishing Bazookas and hand-grenades. I think
they’re from the Book of Revelations, because of that whole Armageddon thing. But
when a new bar of soap feels more like an old friend to my nose, the hand-worn
pages of all my ancestors splay out behind me in their hundreds and thousands,
seemingly separate units of doll-house furniture, each cocooned in its own history
clear back to the ancient cilia-spinning wise ones who first adopted this mindscape,
forgot the meaning of emptiness gradually, like a nightlight dimming. There are no
opposites here. Each thing comprises the non-spatial awareness of all planets and
galaxies thought into being. As if a house full of miracles weren’t enough. The full-
headed young alchemist about to find the very stone itself, you embody the headless
realization of infinity, I tell my self. The heady aroma of time fades into a lavender
mist. If you hold the end of never to its full-circle destination at always, like on the
face of a clock, it meets its beginning, which never evaporates, but regenerates in
transparent objects of astonish. This confusion of inward and outward. This twist
of anteroom vertigo language generates as it recreates me in its own image. In cycles
I lump memories, withdraw books to shield me from the void, the monster nothing,
the abyss. Typical of a child in time-bound mode, I fear. But then I release, sink
back through the papery ceiling, walls, and floor of this faux prison, to be held by
the self I’ve longed for in the motherless sorrow of wanting always to come home.

Bobby Parrott’s poems appear in Tilted House, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Diphthong, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. Wearing a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado.