https://squareup.com/store/shawn-pavey-poet

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/survival-tips-for-the-pending-apocalypse-shawn-pavey/1131792721?ean=9781950380343

BIG NEWS! My “new and selected” works will be coming out sometime in May through Spartan Press and will be available online through Amazon and Barns & Noble. This is every poem I’ve written that I’m willing to let see the light of day, folks. It’s all in there.

Prepare for a barrage of shameless self promotion for the next month or so.

Photo by Jay Halsey, cover design by Jason Ryberg.

Lament in the Key of 4G

Out here in the Heartland, wind howls
hot across browning grass and concrete and cars.
We lose our voices; lose the sound of words
we use when shouting above the din of our lives.

Nothing provides comfort, so needed here –
this loud life.
                 So much to remember.
We carry expensive dig-
ital phones to track our appointments,
send our truncated messages in dig-
angelic text, take our calls, give us
direction so we are never lost wherever

we are and wherever we
go we never escape; noise follows footsteps and driving
and spending and
                 working and working and working.

https://asitoughttobe.com/2018/02/28/the-very-southern-pronunciation-still-rings-in-my-ears-a-conversation-with-poet-mike-james/

I Drive to Late Autumn, 1980

I drop a worn needle to a fresh groove
as Don’t Stand So Close to Me twinkles
into the cans of my Nova 40 headphones.
Here, vinyl gleams its petroleum rainbow
smelling of paradise.

I am 13 years old.
I am 13 years old
daydreaming of stage lights,
guitars, microphones, and the chance
that doe-eyed Denise Rodriguez bounces
in the front row of my rock stardom
with her long curly hair, exquisite silk skin.
She is everything lovely.
I sing to her and she adores me.

And now, gray-whiskered and 45,
driving a sedan on my way
back to work after lunch, I chant
Zenyattà Mondatta
Zenyattà Mondatta
Zenyattà Mondatta.

Twin Sisters, 1981

Imagine a mountain in Colorado in black night of early
morning, late July. I am a teenage boy. Imagine a spray
of stars.

At the summit, above timberline where trees cannot grow. A
boulder, hollowed from wind and rain, heat and ice. Imagine.
I sit inside the rock, look down on rivers and lakes collected in
hollows carved by glaciers through time. Sun crests the eastern
horizon. Imagine flame. Imagine sky. Imagine
reflections of sunrise mirrored on water thousands
of feet below.

In that place and that time. I am small, and immense, all
things and nothing. The only sounds: wind, breath,
the beating of a 14 year-old heart.

© Shawn Pavey, 2015. All rights reserved.