John Thomas Allen is 38, loves stained glass, and loves imagery for imagery's sake.  He also enjoys giving single dollar bills to crack addicts at real carnivals, igniting charity balls for people who don't work, and entertaining strange strangers online. He admires the work of Peter O Leary, Bernadatte Meyer, and Mina Loy.


The Carnival Tarot

I was there the night the carnival tarot began
  In a glass mosque of magic satin 
flooded with fireflies 
     winding the meditation boxes 
   to a focus levels flooded without grounding 
        To a focus level split in the screaming   
        sonar whistles 
     dew drops of dim deja vu, 
         beads bodiless with worlds shed aflame
           echoes of billiard halls in their boozy spider glass 
           echoes of hobo clown gangs split in galleys  
               of long handed shadow  
           echoes of orchestrated lightning in black boxes 
           echoes of paint chips patterned after a decayed 
                  glass marquee in downtown LA
              The third eye all smoke  
                and thus frying the Om…
   now with the dowsing snakes hushed buzz. 
     The fleecing syncopation of All In All   
                            All At Once
    Before falling they’d seen ameythistine temples,
               rising tide of movie monsters eloped
                   from the moving pictures 
                   in the singular monstrosity of self possession
         gravity’s cells swallowing each free breath of even
                                 air.
      In the EVP library’s soundscape, the voices freed
      the dead’s sound bytes inside holofoil crypts.
       The pale swan arms, bonding afterlives, braille echoes on the No. 5
      pencil 
      She sang the Hours with carnie ministers, crowned ghosts.
        The icons were flooded out with sound mirrors the body 
                                        of a saw
      Refracting icons in the library’s reading room 
         Howling and nude in caged specters of lightning, 
               eyes smoked like a blue owl
                     a  dribbling decoy of light.