The moon is a damp alloy curdling 
with a blue snarl. Chilling ministries 

speed hearts on October nights, 
your sleeping face hammered with moon.  

A simple walk is all of my duende’s 
deep song. I will trek the Liberty Taxes, 

abandoned storefronts and dark arcades,
easy noir mosques, sober gas stations.

Brittle fangs grow in vacant craters,  
a stinking smog seals an astronaut’s 

scream. Night’s natal gnosis rings  
in dormant dilation, woolly syllables 

ring in the cicadas’ splitting aural assault,  
a discordia’s assonantal, atomic ablation.   

An ill choir doubles: You can stay here
when things get warm. You will only hold God’s 

hand to chew it off. A knee bends in the desert,
coptic scripts of lunar foil nicked with rotting stars. 

And where are you? You of retail revolt, 
misshapen hubris, pragmatic puppetry. 

A simple waltz of eloped faces, Slenderman elisions
and discarded industrial beer cans
are all of my days and nights.  

I’m sick of hearing about your condition.  
In a forest’s blue rot, fireflies will eat 

on the body of your poor person,
You’ll struggle in the dark, and only be found             

               as something witchy.

John Thomas Allen likes the slow unfurling of meditative poetry which is almost too much poetry to be poetry–Wallace Stevens, James Wright, and the early surrealists.