SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Thirteen
JOHN THOMAS ALLEN
The Blue Spaces
In most spaces the blue won't hurt you;
the endless sky
will seem an unending beacon
akin to a never-ending bird
or simply an overfull pail.
In other spaces it will function as an x ray
baring your insides to all passerby
whether you notice or not.
The smaller they get, the more they seem
like small chinks in a prison half invisible,
a parable glued to shadow.
In the very rare spaces you will move
as a tired stranger might
aware of this horrible enormity,
this dislocated enmity
and find how small and without reality you are
in this origami puzzle
this imprisoning infinite without end.
Fatherhood
I hypnotized the dream doll
it came yesterday
The soft pickle hands, the big eyes
I could touch its dreaming
Its hands gnarled
In a vacant hothouse strewn with metal orchids.
It came with a dream catheter miles long,
uncouth
It was there I began to worship
I could hear it breathe
I came to be the templar
A vanguard for hollowness
It was a matter of looking after –
I was there the night the eyes opened
glowing as a marquee rotten with light
The pink lids grew swollen
I felt the vegetable heads bloom.
Such are the processes
With the poetic peony of birth
Where a star sits fed by fruit flies
Where its dream unfolds as a membrane
to feel the point the shade has
its horrible center In our embrace
in the full hothouse
growth of my vegetable head
Sea Sick Moons
During the lost hours of your dream seizure
orchid jewels wormed through your nostrils,
hearing the cuckoo clock's deep song
of absented colors, simmering in the slow
half moon blinking in its belly. The panning Bermuda
angles, the roulette angels coupling,
bodies tin crowned and bodiless fleece.
Scalped dreamcatchers and an oblong eye
blinking, green and bold.
John Thomas Allen is from New York. His collection Cemetery Tour, recently published by Monocle Anti Lash Press, has been nominated for an Elgin Award. His other book entitled Lumière was published by NightBallet Press in 2014. His poems have appeared in Veil: a Journal of Dark Musings, Arsenic Lobster Magazine, Sulfur, Mad Verse, The Cimarron Review, etc., and he has a story in the anthology titled Narrow Doors in Wide Green Fields edited by R.W. Spryszak. He edited the anthology of Surrealist poetry entitled Nouveau's Midnight Sun: Transcriptions from Golgonooza and Beyond (Ravenna Press, 2014). In 2019, he won James Tate Prize for his chapbook entitled Rolling in the Third Eye, which was subsequently published by SurVision Books in 2020.
