INTERVIEWS
  
He discovered it, antique and strange,
in the cellar of that moss-veined farmhouse;
propped it in the corner of his secret studio,

where he stood, transfixed as Narcissus,
regarding the average, his father´s forceful etching:
flat face, narrow shoulders, short timid legs,

every bit the accountant his father sculpted,
streaked by desperate stains of paint; he made
the vow, again, again, to unbind himself

from the ordinary; and through the other side,
things heard, converged from Catalan countryside,
things once seen only in dreams of peasants.

Behind him animals of line and riot
frolicked in midair; disembodied eyes opened
in blue beyond his window--never there

when he turned, but always in the glass,
too flat for any eyes but his to see, cavorting
in and out of frame like microbes under the lens.

He stared for hours, days; let them infect his retinas
till he saw, as they, how opacity of walls or skin
were mere parlor tricks, how his face, his house,

the farm outside, the world itself stood open
as the sky; how life´s residual glow, bright corona,
clings to possessions simple as forks or shoes.

On the fourth night he went to sleep starving
and they invaded his dreams. Next morning,
the mirror gone, but from then on they followed

in window reflections, in puddles, in corners
of a watering eye, shape shifting entourage,
endless carnival in orbit around his grasping soul.

He welcomed them, longed his life to join
their number, trade his skin for writhing, fluxing line,
unwinding hues which can no more be contained

than pagan dances of the frenzied spirit.









A newspaper reporter by day, Mike Allen moonlights in his spare time as editor of the speculative poetry journal Mythic Delirium-- and as president of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. About Mike's latest collection, Petting the Time Shark and Other Poems, poet R.H.W. Dillard writes, "Mike Allen shows us how science fiction poetry can do what all first-rate poetry does-- rouse the imagination to venture into darkness and the unknown, there to discover old truths and new delights." For more information, visit: http://www.descentintolight.com
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