I’ve been shooting at stars

all day in this Rapture

in lazy floods

hoping I strike a piece

of you so it will fall in toy diamond,

citrate frost, something I can chew on.

Your braided dream lilies looped

together with dowsing rods crafted

by an alchemist in a deleted scene

from a shelved noir. 

For this space ordained 

you, this panel graffiti in obsidian marker,

the confessional alarm

in your belly button,

and your bitten lilypad psychophage 

waits for your heart’s Host 

to fall with flipper women hissing

beneath spinning Roman columns,

hungry as light bulbs dimming, 

their receivers

ringing one 



after another

John Thomas Allen is a 38 year old poet who likes the novels of Pierre Jean Jouve, John Olson, and and Jaroslav Seifert.  He hopes that there will be a poetry arcade somewhere, someday, and a real arcade, not one with wifi.  He’s recently been in Synchronized Chaos, Dreams and Nightmares, and Veil: A Journal of Darker Musings, and in 2018 won the James Tate Prize for “Rolling In The Third Eye”, a collection of his poems.