SurVision Magazine

Nightshade Lullaby


Oh I've had enough of these ambulatory angels
Screaming ingots spun
in our ivory maiden's cyclops' eye.

A crypt cuckoo tower
with sarcophagus marble
Eye shark dead and self assured

stitched a flea bitten cat o nine tails

Oh I've had enough ambulatory angels
our universal children throwing lipstick

To the needy who hear crib death
and roast beneath

The sarcophagus' cracked tower
eyes shark dead and self assured

Soft as a pearl bitten cat o nine tail;
verse is pyrite's finish, raining dayglo
The meadows rifled with bodiless deja vu.

Pure music is the cry for a shepherd's mercy.






Camphor Body


What I was missing you found.

A poster in a desolate city
city cell frequented by bus monks.

Where I undid an old girl's
orchid beads rotting in her curls

and rubbed Frankincense
on her mice bitten Book of Hours.

You had no time to search for me

especially during the day,

so your tarot, painted in 8mm
Took on a life of its own

extended in frames. I slept
in bathhouses and the Pollock displays,

the Hematite between your teeth pinched
the clocks of weather balloons I'd

captured and a lunar bleach
made me slick for your arms.

I came home after dealing cards
with old clowns in the library's reading

room. One, in a MOV only half
filmed, whispering lust, lust...

His eyes were toad jade, either/or,
a distant ore in a flapjack. Smearing my

lips with Dramamine, I dab away
continents in chemical paintings. I am

whole in your GIFS, your photo
formula, back in your darkroom. You will

add chilly organ spells to my adventures.
I am him now, her, the sex

of that trinity.






The Old Age of the Assassins


I have seen the Orient retire
In the pond's Yellow home base
         octagonal

I've seen the mothman with a gas mask
his leather jacket opens to a candelabra
a nestle harmonium the nipples of Christmas
lights irradiate with crystal tenebrae

I've tapped the split moonlight in reverberated
fevers and clipped the moon's plasma
The markered fevers, the spells, the snow's
Symbolist moon accruing caches of pyrite bullets
The moon trapped in fireflies and the crack
smoked hourglass

The trap peacock is spread eagle
in the Lego's eye and the catch
tracings of the sutured moon
The sensory pheromones and sixth sense
I have seen the Orient retire
cueballs

Dribble in the brouhaha
of a Leprechaun's
golden eyes The phalanx
eskimos give unction
from on high

A spell traced in vision is lit with fever
And the candelabra's vision
is refused in A. E. Housman's skull
Staring in cauterized flame
Still here and with you.







John Thomas Allen is from New York. He has edited three anthologies of speculative and mainstream poetry. His first book, Nouveau's Midnight Sun: Transcriptions From Golgonooza and Beyond, was published in 2014. His new book entitled Fake Shemp is due later this year.  His poems have appeared in Veil: a Journal of Dark Musings, Arsenic Lobster Magazine, Surreal Poetics, The Cimmaron Review, etc., and he has a story in the recently released anthology titled More Bizarro Than Bizarro.