DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

My short story “The Button Bin” is now available online in its entirety at Apex Magazine.

No One noone I do not hear a tapping beside me at the window. I will not raise the shade. I will not see eyes there, silver with reflected moonlight, the same eyes that flashed outside the attic window as I peered up the dark

A real-life version of this poem actually happened to us, years ago. A teller at our bank mistyped our account number, causing a deposit to vanish into non-existent account limbo. And of course when we wrote checks based on the not-unreasonable assumption that our money

Disaster at the BrainBank™ ATM disaster We’re sorry, we’ve misfiled your personality, and deposited your childhood memories in someone else’s account. We warned you: we’ve just upgraded, you must protect your own persona till the bugs smooth out. It seems you’ve far surpassed your limit

This poem means to be a reversal of the typical poet-muse relationship; I once called it an “anti-muse” poem and was corrected — by a YouTube commenter! — that it’s still a tribute, in its own way. And for some reason, I slipped in a

Giving Back to the Muse 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 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 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