Poetry by R. Betten

Author’s Note: I dance to elevator music, contemplate fine print, sound out letters, buy vowels, and serve lips. My personality is pencil paper. My score predestines me, no ifs, ands, or BOTs about it. Paint my portrait by number. Memes are my caricature. I’m Nixon’s snow jump nose. My favorite pastime is sleep. Commercials tell my life story. I’m more religious than spiritual. I believe in life after death. I’m a people pleaser. How can I please you? I say I love you to be agreeable. By Rodney Betten

Diamonds Are Forever

Sitting on wood pine, I’m looking through diamond latticed barbed wire. Granted garbage obscures my view. Dumpsters rising. I’m tempted to dive in because I hear you gotta jump in to swim and I imagine the same for drowning.

I’m warming the bench, trying to convince myself that diamonds aren’t forever.

Lunch Aboard a Hot Air Balloon

Lying supine in the tall grass on the Castle Mountain foothills in Montana, I spied, what looked like, a hot air balloon floating overhead. I stood up and looked through my handmade binoculars to get a better view. And there was President Xi waving at me. I waved back frantically as I ran to keep up with the drifting balloon. Then Xi’s madam held up a lunch basket and smiled. I wished them traveling mercies.

Almost Let my Hair Grow Out
Dedicated to David Crosby

Almost let my hair grow out. It happened when I was just a crewcut kid. It was getting’ kinda long. I coulda said it was my style. But I didn’t.

‘Cause Mother’s eyes told it’d be years before I could let my freak flag fly. Besides, it was near Christmas time, and I’d been pestering my little sister a lot lately, mom said. It increased my paranoia.

Like looking at my mirror and seeing my two front teeth still missing from last Christmas. But I’m not giving into fear. ‘Cause I got my haircut soon after.

When I finally got myself together, I went downstairs on Christmas morning. I heard Santa’s belly laugh, “Ho, ho,” as he separated the naughty from the nice.

But I’m not giving in to an inch to fear. ‘Cause I cut my hair and promised I’d be nicer to my sister for the rest of the year.

An American Affair

We shared our scars and fell in love. We jumped into the Mississippi Latrine to consummate our celibacy. In sex therapy, we tendered but it never crossed the blood-brain barrier. We resorted to sliding down the banister for our sexual pleasure. Of course, environmental concerns were ballistic and bolstered our relevance as we decided to conserve as much garbage as possible. Hoarding most stuff.

Hoarding eroded us but we continued climbing mountains and fighting pilot programs and percolating kept us in touch with law-in-enforcement personnel. For recreation, we profited from poor people but abdicate any responsibility for poverty. Prison convicted us to be career criminals. We marched on Washington to raise funds for the dearth of ubiquity. Moreover, we always paid of Bill of Rights on time. Kites never really interested us. But our love of country led us to the cult of politics. In fact, we were baptized in Civil Religion but are more religious than spiritual but still respect the pastors at our service stations.

Therefore, we belong to a small group of large retailers who hold us accountable for being more insincere and insensitive but better off.

Eclectic Electric

Her name is Trisha, Trish for sure. She’s electric eclectic, illicit in her stance, offset by a center-gap and silky black, not to mention all the rest.

I like that she smokes, and I mean that both literally and figuratively.

My Marriage: A Haiku

Love left long ago
Recently I did the same
Rebirth is timeless

I Dream of Drina

Slouched on the couch, looking for magic in a bottle, I reached for the remote to steady myself. Surfing the airwaves, brain offline, mind on hiatus, I took a raincheck for thinking and started dreaming.

About Drina, my smoke shop crush, long legs, fabric-flared, ankles bared, hopeful
halter top, Milky Way midriff. When I recite my poetry, she snaps her fingers rhythmically, which is rocket ship, and when she blinks and nods, all my wishes come true. I’m an astronaut lunar landing, a giant step for me but not for humanity, being the jealous type I am.

Same time, same channel, drifting in and out, waking up to another I Dream of Jeanie rerun.

Nowhere Wear

I get all dressed up whenever I have nowhere to go. I look sharp when prone to be a couch potato. No one need say, “You look marvelous holding the remote.” When addressing walls, I dress the part: wide ties and massive lapels. Echoes repeat my rhetorical rhetoric.

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

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