Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Mambo’s Blues
Sad Spanish strains on
Night street
All dissent quiet
Church mice sleeping
Humans creeping
Petrified forests
Papers run you around
Papers to walk the dog
Police looting city blocks
Forgotten masquerade masks soaking in
God forsaken puddles
Gloves, skeleton mud runners
Double fried kisses, canned peaches and mist
Stare from
Weathered shelves
Embraces on hold till a
Magic clock-strike twelve
Poets creak, Paris pastors reach,
in abandoned plunging
hollow cold-ice streams
With great introspection
Masses ponder the great dissection
Easter bunnies screw in tournesol sheds
The bum rap meds, no one to touch his hand
Lab rats grin as the mother
of all vaccines warms to the
Resounding orchestral death march
We stay together Keep our love
Hide in the never heard of
Knit our threads, bake our breads
Sing our songs, read Walt all night long
Nurses, doctor helping hands
Stave off the storm with clothespins
Nature heals, as the wheels roll off the highway
Rest like tires in a wilted roadside graveyard
Shutters Flailing
Shutters flailing viral winds
Mind eye flashing gold
Designs of maladroit wine boats
Rocking shipshake harbors
On my droopy curtains
Sweet Suzy muse never forgets my address
Drops off provisions
Flipping bad luck coins
Like hot cakes griddle bound
To the sunrise…
Leapfrog fantasies
Kind of blue nights
Late winter Paris
Sunup
Mother earth freaking
Miracle balm on our last sundown legs
Used to trip on window pane
Now it’s tryptophane
Sleep away this nightmare, nevertheless
Ship ahoy, mates!
Merchants of Misty
All that lay before me
package of unbroken road
Scattered ship memories bobbing up and down
like
Technicolor bouys in fog swept heaven
maritime fantasies
Lips sealed shut
Dance starts with
the merchants of misty
flashing neon glimpse of heaven
mist brown miracle shows
a way beyond the
burleque rain of tears
storm trooper years, here
Northern bound highways
Joy and sorrow shifting lanes
To the marrow, driving feckless firecarts
into blood clot alley ways
where fruitless beggars multiply
saints on cloud pillows pass by
walls etched phantoms of Edward Albee Rachel Carson
kissing sweet charred mountainsides
Eyes on infinity
I row to the islands
first seen at the check out
from half-plank reality
Merchant of misty
pulling down rain
from Invisible one-horse skies
herds of rolling thunder
listening opens the magic eye
a wide-eyed lightning magic harpoon ride
moonglow nights
wheeling moving word statues off with a languid kiss
this soul business
Merchants of Misty
Poet and musician, Michael D. Amitin travelled the roads of the American West from California- east through the smoky burgs and train depot diners of Western Colorado, where he lived before moving to Paris, France. Recently named International Beat Poet Laureate 2020-2021, Amitin’s poems have been published in California Quarterly, Poetry Pacific, North of Oxford, Cajun Mutt Press, and many others. A current collaboration with Parisian photographer Julie Peiffer has given rise to the “Riverlights” project.
Paris, France
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