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.
