Monkey Lunchbox Diptych

Before starting a new position, Bobby Parrot packed his monkey lunchbox with two surrealist poems…some 9-5 sustenance.

Writing & Art by Bobby Parrott

Tentative in My New Position as Psychedelic  Melting Typewriter in Charge of All the Robots

More previously scheduled than alive. Persona emptying its assemblage, scientific mismatch in the decompression capsule of my sprinkling viscera. Less talking alarm clock than moon-frosted spoon, the loop for which I was knocked thrumming on its hinges, spooling into the celluloid of my life’s film. The egoic unscrambling of tasked mind relentless. I won’t unsay any of this, but the monkey lunchbox of your restaurant arrays my face into houses the next street over consumes gradually. Sea of nevertheless. Tomorrow I’m fresh toast but today still pours out its butterscotch giraffes. The entire world as I’ve realized it beginning to reinvent itself. Notions of perhaps fluctuating down our necks until my cardiac drift moves five beats, psychedelic melting typewriter waking up to find itself in charge of all the robots. Neuroscience electronica stalling for its saddened honeycomb in emergency concrete. Artificial Intelligence rethinking nuclear hammers with a nursery flower logo snow-globe enclosed, a whitening iridescence.  

 It’s Hard to Imagine a Time Before the Monkey Lunchbox 
Thought, a boiled egg, its cushion of plastic wrap bumpering a metallic, latched cosmos– and Space, embryonic clock-tooth reversal, headstone unhinged as causality, an over-simplification of mental hunger. Of sandwiched meat. So I think: a metal state, just like a mental one, enacts an enclosure dispatching the day’s victuals of unravel, engulf, to induce a personal pressure-suit of indenture and release, the hypnotic trans-spatial pocket of pavilion, of creaturehood. And language tenures the illusion of having a perspective, instead of being one. Philosophy primes the dialectical game of naming the container to the squish of extinguishing dissonance, the vestibule of waiting in line for the unthinkable. Being a person cartoons us in its slice-and-dice packaging, wonder of the one washed away thru the goggled lens of us-and-them, a torment baked into the story of being born. I can only think my penny-candy mortal self. And anything I can think is by definition a monkey suit craving a return to its chartreuse prayer-egg. To its other. Here the carrousel spins on its wheel and becomes. Both everything and nothing, vertical asterisks curious to reconvene spherically on the other side of a set of hips, identify with visceral self. I turn more synonymous with time. Which is to say, religious in my estrangement and therefore unconscious, transparent. How all books are written by the same author. When even a house adjusts to the bandwidth of its residents, narratives disengage my face. I postpone the next sequence of cereal, books, a bicycle whose chain wobbles its linkage at the edge of trans-lunar terrestrial. This box-with-a-handle called my life vehicular. And I’m constantly reformatting. Throbbing like a trapped bird. My orange compass needle swims its liquid sub-chamber, finds another magnetic north, flickers in and out of collective hyper-existence. Lunchbox Monkey has never been in a funeral parlor, but the bicycle he pedals home from school every day attracts a jacketing, a bubble-suit halo, collapses the amorphous waveform we call love.


About the Author & Artist

Bobby Parrott’s universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimensions between breakfast and adulthood. In his own words, “The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder.” Immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, this queer writer dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule of Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, his house plant Zebrina, and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.



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