Two Poems By John Thomas Allen





 Two Poems
John Thomas Allen


Sweeney Todd’s Pastoral


Let’s finish. I will help you once, here in the cutting station. I will swab your eyes with Mandarin cotton and slather your bald head with drooling hexagons of Barbicide. Reaching in the jar next to those angular instruments, I will unpeel your eyes from mine and your obscene ant colonies of black stubble will crawl as a somnolent blue glares back, and within this mirror outside of which you no longer appear, the two dark moons of your exact hunter’s snare should go cross-and a flood of dirty water from the moth eaten janitor’s bucket slops the surface of your reflection in raining dispersion while your two disproportionately large and stubbly hands reach (one cracked in the sea of age, bone and spotted liverwurst, one cauterized forever with the decades harvested red ions of children’s silent screams) rise one at a time and with the patience of hobby horses at a carnival ride, to gauge my approach. You are fluttering. breathing as a man caught up with that one last thing in the week’s sleeping middle, as he begins to lose breath, only in a special way, as though a single hair had risen somewhere it never had before. You will still eat up gooey compliments up about your new baby blues as you feel fortune cookie strips fall from your muskrat ears with the frantic ring of a dated cash register informed of it’s eventual fate in the blinding lamplit alley end of a noir cut-out book for children who are dropping the filaments of paper glass through to the chair you are bound in giggle. A dry itch of burning nose hairs somewhere distant bothers you and a shuffling rainbow morph of bodiless deja vu takes a small boy’s shape in this always dimmer glass moon. Did that hurt? Consider: all this is gentler than, well, any standard experience as you’ve had here waiting in this spinning chair for someone to finish it in the cutting stations and drugged city nighttimes and all of autumn’s black delicatessens, and the body of Halloween leaves belly up with their Rice Krispy nightmare chill. In this last last cut I will read you a blinking red, white and blue bed-wetter (though I suspect the colors are dimming a bit) and as we close, and as much as I love parting without goodbyes, willful amnesia will not be possible; we can share something one more time. I will unfurl, for you, before we begin, a silk flag of cruel gnosis some desire but none really deserve or should want: because of me you will know your number, date, and time.





Dolly-Shot: Camera Zoom


City items: a crack baby, cicadas, petrichor  rain vows, a treehouse above a stairway half-completed…that moth eaten music box:  anyway, they drag me in (off time) through a tonsorium  with my cloak, and here I sleep, in a cloakroom where the roof leaks.  I blow hermetic stars from a flute; they flake on your first lens, your asbestos palette, and the audience passes.  I’ve met Conrad Veidt,  Malcolm McDowell, and Andy Garcia.  I threw my cape, turning my back on them (all at their direction). And these slashed ribbon boughs rise as  memory’s scarred waters, my makeup crusts away in space as a mime’s mirror, each crag, dissolute possibility: a brow remains, and the phantom furls, a church organist’s libretto.  My face discharges as in Mask with Eric Stoltz, and I count to keep calm as the green slime moves…



(A “dolly shot” is a technique filmmakers use to zoom in on the subject.  These prose poems are emerging in a book called Fake Shemp. They are from the perspective of an extra in the movies.  One has already been published in SurRVision.)




John Thomas Allen is from Upstate New York though he travels to the city often. He has edited three different anthologies, all three of which included writers of speculative poetry and also writers one would term mainstream. In my first book, “Nouveau’s Midnight Sun: Transcriptions From Golgonooza and Beyond”, in 2014 he formed a group of diverse poets (everyone from David Lehman to poet John Olson) and formulated a surrealist/ Neosurrealist vision for the anthology. The poems “Camphor Body” and “The Sleeper In Transit” are from an upcoming book entitled “Fake Shemp”, about a deranged extra.  He has poems emerging in Surreal Poetics, The Cimmaron Review, Veil: a Journal of Dark Musings, and two other places.