Genome Dice
Poetry by John Thomas Allen
Poetry by John Thomas Allen
To David Detrich
The negative halo of Surrealism, a lime green bunson burner flickering in dream’s egoless cubes, is akin to a dark jewel dangled in a drowning mime’s mouth. The splash makes no sound, but we hear it forever. What could be done to reach the chiaroscuro ballerina, black pink grained, spinning in a streamroom domicile? Surrealism is Eros, the woman in sepia gelatin. How could she be reached? She’d been given a blue ring of ochre that rang and sang, he’d spent nights and days with her, but a gelatin freeze remained. How could she be reached? A word fallen like lead thumbs? A scream so horrifying it would render Lucifer deaf? He couldn’t maintain her face, it shifted. Strange is a mathematics of semiotic dislocation now. This is not Arnim, or Achim, or the uncanny. A sense of dislocation related to civilization is not the same as the uncanny…. A cryptographer struggling with a code as some struggle with poppers of sea salt asthma, and the molecules were pleasing him in nostril shock, porcelain worms freezing into small hickory smoked bullets burning. He found the books of August Yellow in the egoless ice of the library’s bowels, peppered with black and white salt and stone of marble marzipan to the touch. This is when the rapid jasmine sobbed from the earmarked monsoons of rain and the missals turned Latin pink between her thighs. Bathing it’s in even deeper basement, he screams with joy in the neon light. This victory is the victory of Surrealism.
John Thomas Allen has a blog on WordPress entitled Noveau's Midnight Sun (after the name of the aphoristic collection by expatriate British surrealist poet David Gascoyne). Since 2010 he has been the head of a literary movement (irony intentional), The New Surrealist Institute. Some of the members include David Shapiro, John Olson, Lee Ballentine, and Adam Francis Cornford.
Really visceral. Brilliant