As fusion spreads its fingers, the sun

slips into the non-digital metaverse

of my sleep, umbilical in the calculated

falsehood of history. Since quantum

computers store data from three futures

in parallel, our images of tree houses

decompose one at a time. These days

animatronic brainpower simulates

even a dream's reality, which means

this opalescent soap-bubble thought

could be my mother reminding me

of my electronics, forgotten soil's aroma

infusing our original home. Forests

coil their arms around me, tweezers

of maternal branches singing sunlight's

chorus of celestial insects humming

as if the purple neon fluorescence

of my heart were more than merely God's

avoidance of adulthood, or as my guru

says, of death. So when a sapling's stalk

re-encodes Darwin's data beam, weightless

in the empty elevator shaft of futurity,

this poem's curiosity interrogates all erasures

as seedlings in a process of disembodiment.



Bobby Parrott's poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, 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.