Three Poems
Mark Parsons
The Dream Of The Black Egg
Wind in the stadium sheers,
Eddies,
Swirling around in the bowl.
Gooseneck of flexible microphone boom caught
In chainlink enclosing the turf,
A broadcast headset dangles as listless as a mammal
Exhausted in a snare.
Massively multi-player online game non-player characters
Have tracked the quarry of their athlete
Here, where shudders ripple, crawl across orange mesh
Windscreen swells
Like twitching flanks of animals asleep
And dreaming under azure sky.
Figuring odds on this match he can’t win
He serves to break the tie
Of what he knows
Versus what he doesn’t know.
He holds a long handle
(By that the commentator means
The butt of the handle
Is kept in the palm of his hand).
His mind slogs through a ditch of zeros
Oval-shaped and white like eggs,
The ditch
Endless until it’s not,
Until the egg
That’s as black as an answer penciled in
On a standardized test,
And what he didn’t know
He didn’t know.
Digging in his pocket
He smells the pine tar mixed with sawdust,
Rubs it on his grip.
Concentric grandstand tiers
Silent and empty,
The player emerges from apex
Of shadow that funnels diminishing odds of success
Cast by an outcome he hopes will eclipse the more practical odds
Favored in daytime; belief in eventual victory
Shrinking to purely mathematical, other-than-zero reality,
He glances back over his shoulder at what will become the proverbial decimal
Point
Denoting a likelihood
Even the Las Vegas oddsmakers
Can’t entice
Bettors to see as attractive,
Getting swallowed up in the glare of a goose egg
That looms larger, and burns brighter—
The theoretical point of victory
In the end only in his mind,
The vanishing point of his horizon,
As parallel trajectories of the real and unreal
Converge in dream.
Having Woven Himself Into The World Above The World, The Brute
I. Warp
Like a lozenge dissolving in uterine dark
Light
At the end of the stadium tunnel
Withdraws.
Caught up in a re-transmission
Consent dispute
Ardent fans of a rat-hole team
That’s taken on the disposition of its coach,
Keeping their vigil by klieg light,
As they watch on the eight sided jumbotron
High above, equidistant
From everyone,
The insistent nightmare
Play as
Isolated moments
Diced up and stretched out through time,
The tussle of athletes
Cropped and blown up then turned on an axis
Like a dangerous chemical
Encased in acrylic,
Smartphones and tablets providing statistics and comment,
Play-by-play and color, as fervent supporters
Make for themselves what the networks have blacked out at home,
The mixture of text and hi-def
A point-of-view
Denying an objective account of their world
While it comes to an end
Right below,
Right in front of them, right
Before their very eyes, so they can’t look away,
Can’t see (inside)
(The scaffolding
Stripped bare
Of rhetorical reference)
The hackneyed disaster attachment has become.
Both hopeful and afraid
At the prospect of being ruined and somehow
Also fulfilled,
What they’ve wanted,
Unable to admit to the wanting,
High on pharmaceutically-enhanced levels of
Free serotonin, audience members
Pay a collective price for their excess of happiness.
Volatile emotions bottled up inside,
Condensed and conforming like liquid to psychic dimensions,
A pressurized ballast keeps the faithful afloat on a sea of embarrassment and scorn,
Transfixed
By the fathomless depths below.
II. Weft
Acquired taste of postnasal coke drip
A sour burn
Sliding down his throat
The gambler
Studies the velvet bag of tiles
Engraved with runes,
A golden cord
With knotted aglets loose
Around the crimped casing,
Slips his fingers under the stiff standing collar
Fastened tight around his neck, with brass studs front and back,
Rubs his fingertip pads across a strip of emery
Ironed on the fabric.
Turned wooden pawns
Scatter and skitter across old linoleum squares
Blanched of color by age and dust
As the model on the mattress
Lowers her head
To button-tufted ticking, offers up
Wan buttocks.
Through matched sliding glass doors,
In sunlight beating down so strong it leaves a film like cultured milk,
A flowering branch of terebinth bears
Ruby petals
To aluminum balustrade.
Like a coiled spring inside a wind-up toy
Winding down
A cicada’s call
Winds down
And up against a windowscreen
Giving on an upper story covered walkway
Connecting identical flats
A moon-round face
Presses dark and blurred and indistinct.
Nose Tackle In Body Stocking Made Of Mineral Tanned Hide Flayed From The Tattooed Lady In A Mexican Circus
The proverbial ball and chain
And ball
That’s a player and coach
Tethered together and fired from the heavy artillery barrel
Of art and competitive full-contact
Athletics
Circle like wrestlers before locking arms,
Minds
Clinched in a grapple
(Battles are fought and decided by one
Side, before they are fought and decided by both sides)
Binary code that’s the zero of athlete
And impotent one of his coach, an intelligent brooding technician,
Who watches
The zero of nose guard,
One of those short squatty guys….
Almost impossible to stretch, his uniform
As tight as he wears it,
Glued over shoulder pads,
Anti-microbial circular-knit of compression
Fabric jersey
Numbers bleary over buckles,
Brass eyelets of flak jacket and rib protector,
Gussets of fortified mesh
Gathered
Under a lattice of shoelaces
Crisscrossing all the way up to his armpits,
The player
Trussed in his gear like a gimp suit,
Their dance
Around and toward
One another
An emotional spiral—needle and hackle,
Spur and bridle—
Stalking the distance between them like
A blur of boleadoras after swiftly moving legs of running game
To wrap around, entangle,
Paired satellites winding through space,
Seeking an axis, the mass of a planet to bind and lock
Them in orbit with gravity
Until what drives the zero and one that are in reality
Two zeros in search of their one
(Two because
Every ball’s a sphere with space
Inside,
Space that’s not a sphere),
Countersinks in abstract combat chassis no one can see,
Driving the shaft of a strategy into the charged air of regional fandom,
Flush in the aerodynamically-engineered
Hull that is tracing an arc over pickets just prior to this
Bundled like the fabled arrows Motonari showed his sons, now unfurled
As ammunition from a belt,
Crenellate battlement
Fed in a breech and dis-joined,
A relentless offensive machine gun advance:
The other team’s
Players
Observed from above and obsessively studied
With all the religious devotion and zeal of a primitive tribesman
Converted by literal-minded dogmatic disciples,
But under the cloak of an Asperger’s stalemate of solitude, a hem
Of scalloped tips weighted to hang
As true as baleen ribs
And corset gluten-free seclusion where
The bird-chested, hunch-shouldered one works, ensconced
In the conjugating prokaryotic dark.
Mark Parsons’ poems have recently been published in Dahlhousie Reivew, The Floor Plan, North Dakota Quarterly, Antigonish Review,and Cobalt Review.