DESCENT INTO LIGHT: Mike Allen’s Home Page

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

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 mrb 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 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

A Curtain of Stars curtain The needle repeats with imperfect persistence dotted thread lines, new meridians in cloth, stitches connections between constellations, binds warm lining to a curtain of stars; a seam that would only compliment the cloud-free night should it appear there suddenly crisscrossing

This rough-hewn villanelle is wicked fun of a sort on the surface, but there’s something utterly unfunny underneath. When I worked as a courts reporter, covering crimes, I learned that many terrible things follow utterly predictable patterns. I covered several murders that could be summed

Requited requited You killed me to keep me near. Seven days, from then till now. Why won’t you kiss me, dear? Your fingers squeezed my cries of fear to silence as you kept your vow. You killed me to keep me near. You’ve slaked your