DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

Giving Back to the Muse   She wears a necklace of knives and eyes, a sash sewn from flags and faces, boots welded from bomb fragments, a belt of hangman’s rope. You fear she’ll see you watching but you can’t look away, not even once

A small voice in the back of my brain tells me this poem was inspired by a dream, though if that’s true I have no memory of the dream itself — scattered by the winds, no doubt. What I can tell you for certain is

Petals   field of memories flickers, blooms brushed by charnel winds; desperate to preserve what searing gusts leave behind, I crawl amid the vein-dark stalks that sting my hands, my face; I crawl amid the nettled stalks to find the flowers, to eat: petals from

All my poems stand on the words of others in some way, this particular one more explicitly than most. When my buddy Bud Webster became poetry editor at the controversial Helix: Speculative Fiction Quarterly he hit me up for some verse, but I was stumped

Manifest Density   Let’s play a game of chicken with the Universe. Let’s extend our suburbs to the quasar edge. Let’s burrow condos into every moon, open discount stores at each new sun, carve two-way traffic tunnels throughout spacetime, plan cul-de-sacs of gated nebulae. Let’s

This poem is a lighthearted commemoration of the first and so far only time Anita and I attended Arisia in Boston, a sci-fi con that takes place in the dead of winter (rather inconvenient if you’re driving from Virginia.) That was in 2002, so maybe

Midnight Rendezvous, Boston   The satyr lounges on the hotel lobby sofa, one hoof dangled over the carpet of endless fleurs-de-lis. Men and women in long black coats stumble past, in flight from the flash-freeze winds hidden in Boston’s flurries; they crawl up the stairs,

This poem has a fairly innocuous beginning. Jessica Wick, co-editor of Goblin Fruit, challenged me to write a poem about her favorite Greek god, Bacchus. Of course I accepted the challenge, and, pain in the ass that I am, since she made the mistake of

Bacchanal   he traded his robe for a lab coat its filthy tail sweeps through oil-sheened mud flaps with back alley lurch spine hunched in huddled conspiracy hooves split bleeding a black bile wine reeled everywhere on the tainted ley lines blind husk heeds the

From time to time I’ve written poems inspired by things domestic. This one is particularly dear to me, inspired by the curtains Anita crafted specially for my home office, made from thick fabric with fanciful celestial patterns. Tim Pratt published this piece in Star*Line in