One Poem by John Thomas Allen

 

The Box in Doug’s Room



Doug Hopkins (1961–1993)



Take a curse and bag it up,

theme the tour to amnesia.

He wants the keys? Take a chance.

There’ll be hits, hells, and new melodies.



Take it on the road

Use the guitar claws

Garrote a ghost with a Sitar reed.

Bag it up.



Before they fall away

We’ll snatch up every purse

Bag up the box from his room.

The theme will be Amnesia

A and M in royalties



Take those picks from a heart.

Double up on this wound

And after all

We cut the record on in his tomb



Dipped in our pyrite, dipped in our mold.

Now there are tickets

Now there are tours

But there’s that boozy voice

slung over the Moors

John Thomas Allen is a 39 year old from Albany, NY. He enjoys all forms of poetry, especially the highly speculative and and what allows for the fullest freedom of expression. Without this ability to choose how something is expressed, the art becomes a chore to him. Charles Wright, Peter O Leary, and Kristin Prevallet are some of his favorite contemporary poets. He was recently nominated for the Best of the Net by Sundress Academy For the Arts, and won the James Tate Prize in 2019. His favorite character in literature is Enoch from Flannery O Connor’s Wise Blood. His work has been featured in SuRvision, The Cimarron Review, Peculiar Mormyrid, Spectral Realms, and Synchronized Chaos.