Poetry: Selections from Mark Parsons

Skin

With his wife’s resistance 

Proceeding to lessen with every encounter, 

The General studies the fetish 

His jump boot reflects in the bull-polished toe cap, 

The home base’s off-limits med lab 

And rec center 

As ground-level, wide angle 

Fish eye 

His hand buffs 

In small, neat controlled circles, 

Tight rings on thin 

Layers 

Of polish and not the black leather 

Itself, 

So the slightest touch 

To the layered laminate brittle polish 

Could crack or shatter 

The thin diaphanous glass-like shine, 

Causing the leather to break, 

As the nourishing oils supplied by the polish 

Don’t penetrate, reach the leather 

That shows 

To the tiniest detail 

The cavernous 

Hangar 

As mind-eater 

Convex design magnum opus. 

How’s the host? 

Doing well. 

Then come on! 

Heard over General Shoegaze’s shoulder, behind him. 

The lead mad scientist 

Banters with colleagues and escorts the patient— 

X—on whose body a carpet of 

Caulliflower floret 

Patterned 

Keratin blossomslike carapace, 

Exoskeleton 

Tree bark armor plate 

Grown where clinicians precisely 

Administered 

Prim and immaculate 

Lesions, long 

Since forgotten, the patient’s skin 

Figured like 

Wood with defects, 

Its wild, unpredictable grain 

Sought out despite a 

Well-known inclination to shatter 

Once put on a lathe, 

With a spindle 

Turning the wood 

Of a beautiful blight, 

Infestation. 

Prized for its visual drama and rarity 

(Just like Patient X!). 

A swollen, diseased Rubenesque 

Outbreak 

Of cracked and split-open 

Burls that were caused by an over-reacting 

Immune system 

Cellular level response 

Ruptures the net-like reticular surface 

Of scales, interlocking  

Texture of twisting grain, discontinuous 

Overlapping successively 

Formed and shed 

Fissured layers of outer periderm 

That yields bulbous distended protrusions 

Dense and resistant to splitting: 

Bear scratches, 

Quilted, 

Ambrosia, ghost, 

Angel’s stairs, tiger’s eye, 

Bird’s eye, and spalted, 

And other species-specific deformities: 

Hard to work, rone to chip, break apart unpredictably.,

Tentacles

Horny emergence of keratin marks 

Like a blisterpack 

Arrayed on the freshly baked 

Pie crust terrain 

That’s his painted silicone 

Face and brow, 

Temple and cheekbone, 

Jawline and chin, as the camera pans, 

And his best side 

Leaps 

Into sharpest, most vivid relief for the 

Simple-minded, naïve, and 

Wide-eyed 

French Polynesian 

Bride, prepubescent body 

Devoid of sexual 

Dimorphism, absent all secondary sex 

Characteristics (read: 

The exotic signified, fixed 

And immutable outline 

A privilege of white male fantasy) 

Blurring lines 

Legally, socially, morally 

(Like a tropical sun that obliterates, 

Swallows up forms) 

(The traditions in painting derived 

From societal norms 

Necessarily 

Western, patriarchal) 

He left behind, 

Yet are still in mind: 

He assumes the prize, tries 

But in vain to partake 

Of a Buddhist exemption from rules 

He himself didn’t make. 

Prime ocean-front real estate 

Paid for 

With bad roles, in bad films, 

He paid once, 

He refuses to pay again. 

Make that twice, 

Friend— 

Yet still… 

Running water 

Away 

From those keen on domestic entrapment 

Of fugitive, those who would 

Lure him, only to 

Set the very same hook 

A rebellious and crude 

Adolescent might use to get one 

Of her visible bodily sites 

That’s traditionally if not also 

Relentlessly fetishized 

Pierced, before needlessly showing it off 

To her mother’s new boyfriend, 

Who dreams of the swollen and rubbery cheeks 

Of a seasoned, middle-aged woman 

Prone to emotional eating, symptom or sign 

Of an excess of sympathy, 

As a flying succubus, run-to-buck, 

Weaponized mouth 

From the open and eerily illumined icebox 

Escapes and alights on his face when his girlfriend gets something to eat 

In the course of her Halcyon sleepwalk at night. 

Port of the mandible-weapon 

Killing an injury 

Called death, killing the injury caused 

By awareness of death, 

Every weapon a future wound, 

Every wound 

Will become a weapon 

Designed kill, 

And which boyfriend, 

Who’s really not anyone’s boyfriend, 

Finally wakes with a start in his bachelor mancave recliner, 

In front of the wall-mounted, flat panel 

4K TV, home shopping channel announcer dressed 

In a low-cut top of advanced engineered 

Shapewear that threatens to wardrobe malfunction 

Her generous, overripe assets…. 

His heart 

Calloused, grown hard, 

His humanity drained from the monolith head 

Prototype classical profile 

Of aquiline nose and elongated face with a high, steeply-pitched brow 

(All his humanity 

Cast temporarily, destined to run 

And evacuate, leave an impression that’s faint 

In the darkness 

A thatched hut casts, 

Drenched in 

South seasunlight, 

The lines 

Of his noble features 

Remain intermittently visible 

Beneath fat: 

A man gone to seed, lump, 

A brass ingot stamped, cold drop 

Forged in a closed die: 

The finished product devolves, comes 

Full circle: 

First impression now 

Faint, 

He finds out (though too late). 

This is 

For those who win, 

This is 

For winners, 

The worst 

Place on earth. 

Virus extracted 

But nothing respires— 

There was never a pore that was clogged 

With this death-cult modernity, 

Yet eyes well and blood runs for the first time 

In a gilded age 

Little girls can aspire to 

Live in, 

Inhabit before adolescence 

Transitions to awkward ungainly mature sexuality, 

A kind of adulthood 

That cordons off, cordons off... 

What? 

No one knows, 

Least of all 

Girls who resist giving up, giving in 

To demure, in exchange for the life-sentence prison conventional manners assure— 

Which is hard 

On the young man, valet 

To a person or persons unknown— 

Not unknown! 

Rather on company orders— 

Whose workout over, his workout summary  

Scrolling past and displayed as red 

Light-emitting diodes behind a thru-hole mount, 

Limpid and seamless as water 

Across individual squares of the stock market ticker-style readout 

(Postage stamp 

Sized reflective blocks 

Visible, set in the greyish matte overlay 

[Head at an angle]) 

That plays as a counterpoint, 

Mocking his maximum heartrate achieved— 

Our young man falls away 

To sink 

Back in the lithe, 

Glabrous, 

Sexually ambiguous 

Arms of the dancers, androgynous 

Faces made up 

So the features are masculine, heavy 

Yet delicate, sharp… 

He retreats 

To his inner life, 

And laconically grinning, 

Cut-off, good-natured, and cynical 

Says 

To new-minted counterfeit man, 

Who’s not really the man he’s pretending to be, 

“I like your work.”

Mark Parsons' poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in Ex Pat Press, Dreich, Cape Rock, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and I-70 Review. His book of poems, Stills, was published by Southernmost Books in 2023. His chapbook, Lake Tahoe is an Elegy, is forthcoming from Alien Buddha Press in December 2023. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.