John Thomas Allen, Doppelganger and New Poetry

The Hand is a Prophet of Doom, 

image by Daniel Y. Harris 

Doppelganger

(For Mario De Sa Carneiro)

May 19, 1890 — Paris, April 26, 1916

When the streets grow pale and crisp
with moonlight snaps, ice eyes

he may emerge, coloring each chilled
breath taken by the solitary citygoer. 

A costumed deja vu, he issues dim calls to
remembrance in the slinking itches

shadow plants far back in the smoke
machine of memory. a buckled succubus,

drawing drowsily on lazy hesitation
he studs our lazy dreams with silver

Foxes, moving quickly through to our
waking moments. growing stronger, he 

bleeds inky halos over the slim lines

written in glee. You may even find

him over the shadow of the pen, 

whispering heavy shades, 

tracing angry contours over the
angry rhythm of every line.

Mario De Sa Carneiro

“Diaspora”

Silence in me, in myself.

Silence in my sister’s house,

she is a beautiful madwoman to dream of…

It would be a mistake to look 

in a mirror, to lay down my life..

My sister is a beautiful madwoman

to dream of in her lost house.

Unless a miracle happens, it would

be a mistake to look in a mirror.

In the next two weeks I lay down my life

for the suns and the fields and the mad 

scream my sister razes above the sun.

I have a snake in the forming my mind…

It would be a mistake to look in a mirror.

Discord in the world, in myself.

The Lighthouse Keeper

I am the lighthouse keeper,

the night manager 

for the ambulance’s 

blue, red wick 

the coordinator 

for whistling colors. 

I fish with wreaths

of goblet flame 

at noontide catching 

dreams of pixie dust 

gold dust women panting.

Lobster orchids crawl

legs in the smoke fall ;

dizzy dolls made sick.

I wind solvents for our yard lines 

clipped with butterfly wings, 

tracing their crippled 

pulses always, fainter,

keeping score.  

Bigfoot ISBNS, mirrors, 

my fog horn double 

down there, enunciate palmistry… 

(along with a little love) 

Keeps our sedate island 

smoking away in good order. 

Clients in the sand 

knock and knock, 

but I get around most nights.

It can be beautiful

helping this tide

kiss our namesakes away. 

White Christmas

(Jon Benet Ramsey)

He turns in his funeral suit,
wiping an nighttime 

algae glow from his

brow. Her hand rests in his palm
with a grenade’s patience, gone

limp just in time to squeeze again. 

Rusting mascara, worn dolls’ heads,

her skin sudden as perfume on vinyl, 

twisting. Their sobs sync in sutured  

silences, a memoriam sown dropsy

in tears proper. Slick camera 

flashes light in a rorschach fugue. 

He is falling, never having known 

them to extend so far down before. 

Skipping a step lower on the carpet's 

stairs, bloodshot eyes blaze at landing’s 

bending foot, lit in nostril shock, 

facedown in a curdling gnosis 

known only to lucid sleepwalkers.

The Holly Flutes, The Fields

(for Deborah Digges)

The dead follow bliss with hound dog eyes.

Cornfields are pawed with their hopes, 

rusty legos, found objects in private renown.

Ellipsis is another key by the tomb.

So knitting thimble, so garage sale ring, 

oak shiver by the moon’s garlands,

the chaplet cupboard’s slide. 

The dead leave holly fields barely touched,
green a cold breakfast whittled 

in small bruises.  So knitting thimbles, 

so mommy’s hearted baseball. 

Only a fool stirs up a bodiless brew.

The dead mesmerize passerby 

with closure hints, eyes wide shut. 

They stand erect, Piggy in Deliverance

cigar shop Indians sturdy for disaster.

Warm brews keep them. They read TV 

captions in slow burn, spilling an alphabet 

for morbid curators. So knitting thimble, 

so hearted mommy’s baseball.

Ellipsis is a trick key in the baritone’s soil.

Their singeing lifeblood crusts in keyholes, 

halls in standby wheeze for later. 

Their facemasks drool in a striptease ballet, 

what’s left staring under the tarp .  

So rusty thimble, so grandma’s crockpot,

so the garage sales open later 

each spotted noon.

—John Thomas Allen

Anne Gorrick, Excerpts from Pantheon

Malware in the Pantheon, image by Irene Koronas

Excerpts from Pantheon

[Zeus]: Attendant of Small Holocausts

The crow was an oracular bird, supposed to house the soul of a sacred king after his sacrifice. (p. 38)

The Greek Myths, Robert Graves

I was Bounty Hunter on this Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure and Pudge went with me / Pudge kept dying and feeding / We ended up with a kind of fed Zeus / He controls lightning / an extra-dimensional race / Now they revel in their new temples, casinos, and media / The future is not very evenly distributed / for us to scan and copy objects / Miss V is joined by her high-maintenance boy-toy Zeus to find out whether he has been secretly dating her best friend Clarisse or not / It’s up to you now to nab this dashing deity / Ammon Zeus Hotel: Amon Zeus is the best!!!!!!!!!! - See 136 traveler reviews, 128 candid photos, and great deals for Ammon Zeus Hotel at TripAdvisor / Zeus is the god of the sky and thunder (among other things) / Zeus’ symbols are the thunderbolt, eagle, bull and the oak (among other things)

Malware, Trojan, virus scam, slots free

There’s a theater devoted to him in Waynesville

an auction at Olympia

Batteries charge the great frontier

It’s the birthday of the botnet

Car chargers and carpet cleaning

It’s dog dating, lightning extrudes onto his enemies, this ejuice

What fasteners attach us to a family tree?

God facts and stupid wishes

Heat shrink helmet replacement, holster hash

There’s an infection in the god of what?

So anyone else think Zeus is a tad OP? / Specifically the ult / I was just in a coop match with hard bots / Zeus and Sand King were bot and we were dire /  I would have had no problem staying in lane if it weren’t for Sand King stunning me and then Zeus slapping me three times promptly killing me / Zeus can shoot it off at a lucky time killing me in front or WHILE HEALING / That’s not right / Now of course I know

The god of fame

a player and a resident

born in Warcraft

Isis had a god’s wings

in her last known location

Is married to what material?

Is owned by who?

Is worth how much?

The patron god of what city?

A fallen angel raised by the king of Washington

Also known as

Born on Crete

Created the frame

What movies was Zeus in?

I’ll get flamed for saying a hero’s OP, but if he’s not OP then how should I counter him? / His ult it seems really needs nerfing / Even when he’s not fed I think this / He’s one of my most hated heroes. His ult is my most hated ult / It’s ridiculous / No hero should be able to take down half my HP when I’m nowhere near them / How to counter Zeus? / Get some experience in the game / There is only one good Zeus player in the world / and that is Merlini / And even he doesn't consider Zeus for progames

Knurling tools

God of the storerooms

Moss bends toward its own mini myths

What would be a good nickname for Narcissus?

Are there owls too in Cape Artemision?

Real steel radio Roman names

Is he a god or a great dane?

Upload his unique qualities with this locator

It’s a Hulk vs. Poseidon

The weakness in a wife name crossword hint

There are x’s on my skin

Zeus is weak / He has low movespeed / He can be stunned and killed easily due to a low hp pool / He has zero control or escape mechanisms / If you get a bkb / he is useless since he has no right-click attack damage / You can get cheap items that boost your HP like Powertreads and Drums /Magic Stick works wonders / Last but not least: All fed or farmed heroes are OP / Some more than others / That's the whole point of the game / Unfair bots are easy / Quick, somebody go get my Buddha overalls / It seems somebody wants to have a little Battle of the Gods

[Hera]: Arms Folded into Her Sides

The seasons were her nurses. (p. 50, 52)

The Greek Myths, Robert Graves

Cosmetics light up with symbols

Her arms embrace even Hera Pheri

Hera’s arms folded

into her sides

into a glock carbine conversion kit

into a linear compensator

That Hercules pistol grip

for her bridal beauty flat irons

There are costumes in her cell essences

her palladium domains

epithets, festivals, jealousy

She gave birth to a typhoon

A water element monster / It is a 6 stars god monster which costs 40 units and it has 2 skills in Puzzle & Dragons / The skill is called Ultra Gravity / Queen of Absolute Zero / dark element monster / It is a 8 stars devil god monster / Permafrost Queen / Resist+Lucifer team / Resist+Odin team / When max skilled it offers a 7-turn cooldown orb change / He transformed himself to a freezing cockoo and appeared to her / But worship is actually far older / “Uses of the Past” . Glossary. / HERA was the largest particle accelerator / Hera is one of the leading manufacturers in the lighting market worldwide / In general, Hera was worshipped in two main capacities: (1) as consort of Zeus and queen of heaven and (2) as goddess of marriage / This was a blind run

The Hera Hotel is in Athens

where history eventually resides in her hips

Even the Iliad is subject to income limits these days

The jewelry in Korean skincare

Hera Koliatsos is on Facebook, lit up with LEDs

She draws the clouds with her mythic Sharpies

Hera has a nail salon in Arlington Heights

She is now almost entirely online

her personality lit by movies and peacocks

What is your Roman name?  Sweet as recepty

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array: HERA / Her stone terraces surrounded by the shades of the magical color spectrum and fragrances that exist only in heaven and on Hvar / After Leto, Zeus found a lover who put him in seventh heaven / She provides continuous support and advice for our members /  as well as an endless supply of coffee and red wine! / Here’s why Hera is such a bitch / the first successful Human/Cylon hybrid / Hera, who walks in golden sandals, is the Queen of Heaven, always a virgin, for she recovers her maidenhood every year by bathing in a spring called Canathus / The HERA is built from the ground up for you – designed specifically around the female form with ample adjustments to make it your own / Drawn with a feathery, simplified ikat effect and printed on / There’s much to learn from the words, actions, and attitude of Hera Syndulla, the fan-favorite Star Wars Rebels pilot

Hera Syndulla was a Twi’lek female rebel who lived

during the reign of the Galactic Empire

Hera Triarii has a polymer dustcover

Hera theraputics are now on trial

Hera-ur descended into cushions of ultra moisture, cabinet lighting

List all encountering monsters here

Vaporize:

her summits, her vital lifting tapping pact, a new skin-fitting foundation

Hera Venenosa:

her weaknesses, weapons, a cleansing foam review

What were her hobbies?  What was she famous for?

an isolation study puzzle dungeon

Protector of Roman crosswords

How much is she worth?

Statue, figure, prophesy

[Hephaestus]:  That the Smith-God Hobbles

That the Smith-god hobbles is a tradition found in regions as far apart as West Africa and Scandinavia; in primitive times smiths may have been purposefully lamed to prevent them from running off and joining enemy tribes. 

The Greek Myths, Robert Graves

Lame god / parthenogenesis child / rejected by his mother because of his deformity / Blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes / a smithing god who had a “regular” job and actually worked with his hands / Basically the nerd god / He’s the quiet, introverted one that spends most of his time in his garage, alone, playing with his toys, building machines and armor and jewelry / with superhuman physical properties, vitality, and functional immortality / somewhat stronger than the average Olympian god (Class 30) and can lift about 40 tons / optimally

Pronounce and grill

the Airsoft Aphrodite in animal symbol

The books found in birds

Duckster disability DanMachi

Engineer your enemies’ eye color

Hometown headset

What modern day odyssey

in his love life, his legs, his legacy

lamebronzeworker

an essay in ejuice

Other

names, oracle, object

Protector of handicraft and arts / as evidence of a privileged place / He might listen to AC/DC Hephaestus is a Raven fanboy / Aphrodite is Bellarke trash / The gods survive by virtue of being remembered / Memory must be protected / born deformed and thrown from the top / of Mount Olympus by his mother / It is unexpected that a god or goddess would be less than physically perfect / While other gods on Mt. Olympus are known to be beautiful and laid back / Hephaestus is more humble in appearance and works his hands to the bone / How to use Hephaestus in a sentence

What to put in this quote balloon?

Revenge

Did he smoke?  What were his special powers?

Timeline, bioshock understars, weak trigger box

He is owned by whom?

The only god with a what?

A heroic handicap hammer game

A baby ruler

Thrown from Olympus

in Spiderman improv

Chariot or donkey? / Not counted among the most handsome / is not hobbling, he is not- yet-but-soon- to-become Hephaestus / Start over again with new Pandoras / They are no longer of clay, but Mecatronic / His highly talented hands fashioned just about all of the fixtures and gadgets used by the immortals, as well as their palaces, thrones and inventory of enchanted weapons / Hephaestus encodes a polypyrimidine tract binding protein that regulates Notch signalling during wing development

Etymology, epithets

a quailing sculpture

that produces headache

“the halting” “renowned artificer”

“shrewd, crafty" or “of many devices”

The special power to produce motion

while marine divinities received him

after a whole day falling

He walked by artificial supports

skillfully made of gold

heavyknee-ed

I don’t even know what this is anymore / this absorption package and other tables of atomic data / In his workshop: Access Search & Social Results Now / Often, he is referred to as Ambidexter / Hephaestus is one of the Ocean Masters hired by Three Rings in December 2006 / HEPHAESTUS is a program for making calculations useful to the XAS experimentalist using a periodic table, tables of X-ray absorption coefficients / Birth is shrouded in a secrecy that is compounded by poor timing / Hephaestus BBQ Smokers and grills Portland Oregon / Pretender Hephaestus is an uber AI resting in the Forge of Hephaestus / More material about his approximate Roman / the kink in his armor

—Anne Gorrick

Mark Scroggins, Capital; or, The Young Person’s Guide to the End Times (3 & 4)

Behemoth and Leviathan (1825)

Pen and Black Ink, Gray Wash, Watercolor, Over Traces of Graphite

William Blake (1757–1827)

Capital; or, The Young Person’s Guide 

to the End Times (3 & 4)

3.

Invocation to my own ignorance. Invocation

to general apathy. Special invocation to

carefully selected, bepoke images

and deities, Old Ones and previous

tenants. Repeated throaty invocations

to quiescent lusts, desire, and cupidities,

urges that sleep past the alarm or hit

the snooze button again and again.

That late-born eighteenth-century Adams

had it right, by way of Willard Gibbs,

though golly it just doesn’t feel

ethereal, the dogshit clouds and haze

of printer’s dust we keep plodding

through. Gold used to flow like

blood though the city’s body.

It looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger

in the first Conan movie, big and taut

and ox-like, curiously beautiful. Then

we had to warp our imaginations around

those rows of falling luminescent green

pictographs, a thousand CGI ticker-

tapes at once. And now it’s all beyond

imagery entirely, a big blur—not even a

blur—a series of waves—no, fuck it,

forces—not really that either—any-

way, we’re pushed around and shaped

and stretched like—flattened, rolled,

corkscrewed and patted down

to sleep. The sky over the water, just

at dusk, feathered wash of pink and yellow

clouds from north to south, buildings

stark silhouettes broken by the ripples

in reflection. The air, emptied by a rainshower,

is warm and cool at once. Behind me

a shirtless man, hair slicked with grease

and sweat, is helping his blonde companion

stand upright. Look at that, baby-girl!

Look at the fucking City! They want across

the water, they want the West Side, they want

money and a place to sleep. The body was found

in the library, of course. Among the books

and papers and ashtray stands, the mounted

trophies, the decanters and brandy snifters,

the grimoires and spellbooks, the slide rules,

among the semi-automatic weapons, the discarded

campaign posters, the American flags and

moth-eaten berets, the wrapped plastic

cutlery, the parmesan cheese and powdered

garlic shakers, the lox-cutting knives,

the complimentary yarmulkes and the Shriners’

fezzes, the bound volumes of TV Guide.

The body beat itself to death with

the candlestick (or perhaps the wrench?),

or so they tell me. The mystery ought to be staged,

it sometimes seeems, in a series of New

England bed and breakfasts, each one run

by friendly but timid sixtyish couples,

full of white people driving SUVs with

GPS and NPR, rollerboard bags and Ivy

League sweatshirts. And you crest the hill,

where a huge bowl of forest opens

before you, one sign to Whately,

another to Innsmouth, another to the Admissions

Department at Miskatonic U.

4.

The storms took us unawares

back then. We watched the east, observed

the birds and furry animals, licked

our fingers and held them to the wind.

You sprawl, limbs and sex and hair,

across a screen, a low-pressure front

dragging my calcified desires across

half the world, spinning and elliptical.

Take no notice of this sign. The moving

sidewalk is ending. The year of forgiveness,

decade of grace, is coming to an end.

Our expiration dates are obscured

by “clearance” stickers. A vein

in my foot, visibly pulsing—or perhaps

the nervous twitching of an eyelid.

Impatience. Imprudence. Forgetfulness.

Blindman fingers carefully

through the thesauruses of his memory,

drawing out the paraphrases, rejecting

discarding the chaff. Repurposed,

refunctioned, extracted and remixed

and reset. The liberty to justify

the way of things, liberty lost

in license and licensing. A kind

of bend in nature’s genetic language,

miscoding or mistranscription, fault

in the lowest reaches of the machine

code. The Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles

Lettres, the Lectures on Jurisprudence,

nugatory beside that grand

and solemn pin-headed justification

of Original Sin. One bird calls

to another, the squirrels race around

the tree, and the wee fluffy dogs

peer out their strollers at the teens

flâneuring their way through the mall.

All that time, all that toil

and pain to get to this—that the price

might be clipped from its tag, and the gift-

receipt might bear no final tallies.

Somewhere far away a computer is shifting

electrons, deciding whether you’ll spend

your last days in a ward smelling

of piss and disinfectant, jolted awake

            through the night by the snores

            of another huddled, neutered

            lump of amnesia, or rolled

                        gently sunward

                        through the park

            by a pair of large-hearted,

bored Jamaican nurses. Pushed

to the Battery, where just on the horizon

you can see the refugee boats

crowded so closely the dots of people’s

heads are only pixel statistics. But summer

won’t turn off the sauna this time

around. I have the sidewalk to myself,

my personal space of personal rule

by divine right. And take that down

with a pamphlet, or a tweet, or

some worthy, ironical meme. The binding’s

come loose in every signature, and the pages

blow past me like Walter Benjamin’s dopey cartoon angel.

—Mark Scroggins

Derek Beaulieu, a a novel (pp 50-54)

a a novel, page 50, image by Derek Beaulieu

a a novel (introduction)

Published in the autumn of 1968, Andy Warhol’s a a novel consists solely of the transcribed conversations of factory denizen Ondine (Robert Olivo). Ondine’s amphetamine-addled conversations were captured on audio tape as he haunted the factory, hailed cabs to late-night parties and traded gossip with Warhol and his coterie. The tapes were quickly transcribed by a quartet of stenography students (including The Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker); rife with typographic errors, censored sections—and a chorus of voices—the 451 pages of transcriptions became, unedited, “a new kind of pop artefact.”

Warhol’s a a novel favours faithful transcription over plot, chance over predicted composition, and a consideration of a novel’s precepts over its actual content.

Building upon my previous novels flatland: a romance of many dimensions (2005) and Local Colour (2008), I have just completed my a a novel, an erasure-based translative response to Warhol’s controversial masterpiece. On each page of Warhol’s original, I erase all of the text leaving only the punctuation marks and onomatopoeic words. Theodor Adorno, in his essay “Punctuation Marks” argues that punctuation marks are the “traffic signals” of literature and that there is “no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks.”

The resultant text is a novelistic ballet mécanique; an orchestration of the traffic signals and street noise of the 1960’s New York City, an eruption of traffic and tires, overheard music and construction noise. A a novel mines writing for an inter-disciplinary musicality which reflect the urban environment, which foregrounds a complex of non-narrative sounds embedded within our conversations.

a a novel is forthcoming from Paris’ Jean Boîte Editions, Spring 2017.

a a novel, page 51-54, images by Derek Beaulieu

a a novel, page 51

a a novel, page 52

a a novel, page 53

a a novel, page 54

Derek Beaulieu is the author of the collections of poetry with wax, fractal economies, chains, silence, ascender / descender, kern, frogments from the frag pool (co-written with Gary Barwin) and Please no more poetry: the poetry of derek beaulieu (Ed. Kit Dobson). He has also written 4 collections of conceptual fiction: a a novel, flatland, Local Colour and How To Write (Nominated for the W.O. Mitchell Award). He is the author of two collections of essays: Seen of the Crime and The Unbearable Contact with Poets. Beaulieu co-edited bill bissett’s RUSH: what fuckan theory (with Gregory Betts) and Writing Surfaces: fiction of John Riddell (with Lori Emerson). He is the publisher of the acclaimed no press and is the visual poetry editor at UBUWeb. Beaulieu has exhibited his work across Canada, the United States and Europe and is an award-winning instructor. Derek Beaulieu was the 2014–2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary, Canada.