SurVision Magazine

Thomas the Ionic


was a man twined into two
times. In the past, Tom

was against living
in cold cribs or in strange

homes and, in all cases, against
voices which weren't his,

with their planned fates.
In unknown days

is the trapped Tom
with a loud voice in a glass

house underneath snow.
If a fire burns from within

melting the ice roof,
if a star falls, or a branch

breaks, is how Tom wishes
escape. Tom is a twined brother

of bound doom in the two
worlds of the hopeless.




Dream Score from an Alleyway

I ask the lady behind the trash
can, "Will I ever know my birth
mother?" She says, "I got a bag

of buffered dreams and mortar for dark
matter night terrors." Something here's
not verisimilitudinous.

The lettuce draped on the garbage
can's lid is too crisp. The cats too fat.
No one here drinks Thunderbird. "Do you

work for Freddy or The Lab's police?"
I want a cigarette. Its long,
warm inhale. The momentary

stay. Plus a pack of matches. "I got
mattresses cheap. Don't know Freddy,
and the cops, well, they're all paid off

by outsiders to rectify pasts,
futures, any possibilities –
The Temporal Security

Enforcers of Causal Relations.
But what I possess is pidgin
opium – tells dreams in any tongue,

makes you sleep quick, remember voices
and dark spaces. See, already
your eyes close. It's all quite legal

if someone claims it is. If you're found
out, you don't know me. Never did.
Never will. Just like your mother."




Tom Holmes currently lives in Mississippi. He is the founding editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, and the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Cave (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2014), which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as of four chapbooks.