John Thomas Allen is from New York. He has edited three anthologies of speculative and mainstream poetry. He’s recently been in Veil: A Journal of Darker Musings, The Cimarron Review, Sein Und Werden, SuRrvision and is sad to see many avant garde magazines (like Jubilat) going out of print.Type a message…

Metempsychotica

In the andromedary dawn, panelist heads

were winding up in time’s lunar summit;

wound for a slow centrist nightmare.

I cut myself on a fish’s growing scales.

It grew under pinched stars,

wrapped in foil

delivered in tar fever

A thing done up with aural flowers,

A dab of dilated time on its gaze .

a Rubik’s space narrative.

It told every kind of story because it had been

so far below. It bled in a hibiscus tea we shared,

sewn in the belladonna brew, boiling in the bruised patchwork skylights above us

. Next to me, knocking at the window: you cannot

break the border between my syntax and white space

of your waking days, or trace metempsychotic angles

on the frame of our opera glasses, Ghostrays

bending in De Chirico’s skylight, a love song

whispered through a cloud’s cowlick

breaking into eclictic kite cells.

Time the pistons of our roulette clocks

or the moon faced haunting in the oak room

This dream fabric would braid your hair in seaweed wreaths, eclictic bows your familiar face in the lottery ball,

sleeping these floaters away

It grew Magritte lips, dunked morphine moon of moonlight cologne. But these bodiless coalitions— past, present, rewound tenses

looped by Archivist Lindhorst,

revised by small hands in his pockets

first our ghosted marginalia,

then indigo cloud pillars

written away as Auden might

catered to arbitration’s taste.

Let magic coalesce with stillness:

what is left

speaking just a bit above itself

in a darkroom is what is most in marvelous receipt.