Category Archives: Poetry

Hollow Point by Shawn Pavey

Another one up at Rusty Truck!

Scot's avatarRusty Truck

Because bullets don’t kill well enough
manufacturers hollow them
to blossom in penetrated flesh
even though last night
10 police officers and two civilians
were shot in Dallas
where five officers died
and the day before, two black men
were shot to death by police officers
on video live-streamed to everyone
even though 100 people in Orlando
were shot while dancing last month
and poor little Tamir Rice
and Trayvon Martin
and Michael Brown
and all the names and all the names
and all the names this poem could be filled with
from Sandy Hook San Bernardino Charleston
Littleton Columbine Ft. Hood
names of innocents
and names of police officers
whose places at dinner tables across America
are empty and empty rooms of soldiers
killed so far from home
and empty beds in Pakistan Afghanistan Syria Iraq
all these names a hollow poem
its endless reams of pages on pages

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Recession in Neverland

I have a poem in this book published by Paladin Knight Publishing. Also, it contains poetry from many of my friends and acquaintances and gorgeous photography from Tim Wherry. John Dorsey, who has a brilliant piece in this collection, put us all in touch with the publisher.  This was an exciting ekphrastic collaboration project where each of us picked a photo and used the image as a muse.

You can purchase it here: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=recession+in+neverland

God Is On His Way by Shawn Pavey

Another poem up at Rusty Truck.

Scot's avatarRusty Truck

Just got a text from the Almighty.
He’s running a little behind.
He was on his way to your subdivision
to bless you in your five-room,
three-bath abundance because
you are so much in need of divine grace.

Anyway, the heavenly El Camino picked up
a bolt off the road in the sidewall
of the driver’s side rear Firestone
because of all that highway
construction on Interstate 35
and, wouldn’t you know it, his spare was flat, too.

He called triple A and is just waiting for the tow truck.
Oh, he said to tell you that you’ll be fine
but you should have figured that out by now
with your health insurance and 401k balance.

He also mentioned he can’t stay long. Something about Aleppo.

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Train Poem

 

Rumbling Through Dreams

 

I.

At midnight and two, it shook walls

with a diesel and steel roar

that could wake the deaf,

yet in a little house built next to tracks,

my brother and I,

stacked in bunk beds,

slept a practiced sleep

as the Burlington Northern rumbled West through our dreams.

II.

Walking in measured steps

from crosstie to crosstie,

I followed that line,

eyes forever to the horizon,

never losing sight of the point

where it all comes together,

stopping only to mine the best pieces of rose quartz,

mica, and coal,

from beside the tracks.

When a train would come, off in the distance,

before moving clear,

like an Indian, I put my ear

to the rail just to hear

the music of steel rolling over steel.

And, at the end of the day,

all walked out,

I dropped my treasure in a tattered sneakers box

with collected stamps, Bicentennial quarters,

Navajo tears, and letters from grandparents

half a continent away.

III.

In the mornings before breakfast

in arid Colorado summers,

I ran to the tracks

to the special place on the rail where I put pennies

the night before,

smoothed flat by impact and mass

of trains carrying coal from the mountains,

sugar beats from the eastern plains,

delighting in the occasional remnant of Lincoln—

a nose, an ear, an eye, a texture of beard,

an e pluribus unum,

each atom of currency destroyed each a different way.

IV.

I dream of riding trains,

of snaking serpentine through the American patchwork.

East Coast forests blending

into Great Plains wheat,

rolling Ohio hills flattening

into the Kansas horizon

slamming into the sheer granite faces

of Rocky Mountain cliffs

and then, through desert sand,

to the sea.

I dream of salt mist and factory smoke,

ponderosa pine and sequoia,

of rain pelted windows and thick valley fog.

I dream and in my dreams, I ride trains

and do not make good time

but rather ride forever on trains that never stop,

longing to reach the place just ahead,

the elusive point of perspective

where the rails merge,

where the separate become singular,

where all things bind together

to be the one thing, whole.

 

© 2008, all rights reserved by the author.

 

 

Here’s What People are Saying About My Latest Book

“The poems in Shawn Pavey’s Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6 examine the seasons in the author’s life, broken down into days and then into moments, whether it’s a warm Kansas City wind, drinking on 39th Street, or a moment of quiet contemplation filled with the uncertainty that comes with just being alive in the 21st century. Pavey’s poems are straight and honest, taking the time to just live now and put it all down on paper, something that the rest of us usually put off until tomorrow. His words are as spare as bone, leaving the wind and taking nothing for granted.” John Dorsey, author of Appalachian Frankenstein

“Shawn Pavey’s poems capture the longing we feel when we lift the needle from a record album. In the turntable’s wishwiswish between Stratocaster riffs, there lies hope and resignation, Bruce Springsteen and hungry cats, maple leaves and ‘plastic blasted into space.’ Pavey’s poems give voice to our hunger for life, a medieval song heard through 21st Century earbuds.” Al Ortolani, author of Francis Shoots Pool at Chubb’s Bar and Waving Mustard in Surrender.

“In Nobody Steals the Towels From a Motel 6, I was reminded of how a gifted poet like Shawn Pavey doesn’t try to convince his readers to have things we don’t need but to slyly persuade us to open our eyes to the presence of the treasure of those things we cannot live without. In this book we have love, surprise, death, angels and more pictured for us in a flow of language both ordinary and extraordinary gracing us with a dancing vocabulary’s most lyrical and unforgettable choreography.” Chuck Sullivan, author of Zen Matchbook and Alphabet of Grace.

Winding Down as the World Wakes

Morning

It is a simple act,
the brewing of coffee in the chill
of a dark March morning.

My cheap automatic drip machine
belches and spits a grotesque sound
as pleasing as any cello concerto
or crow squawk,
making music to make me wake.

The sun will rise soon.

This sky will move from black to gray
and from the window of this low-rent,
one-bedroom apartment
I’ll see the three-story side of Queen City
TV & Appliance,
its top to bottom cracked wall anointed
with a healing concrete salve and stitched up
by two iron bars bolted into brick.

But now it is only a black slab in invisible decay
in the shadows of new monuments
straining up from downtown Charlotte streets,
scratching at the horizon with jagged spires of steel and glass
shiny like aluminum foil crowns
littering the sky like a playground.

Cars already begin to sputter by on the streets below.
A block away to the West, an ambulance siren screams,
dopplering around a corner.
Buses will soon lumber by
with their high pitched diesel moans and sighs,
short sharp squeals of air brake expulsions.

Ceiling creakings above me signify movement,
an unknown body staggering
into the consciousness of another day.
It is business a s usual:
a toilet flush,
a cascading of pressure-fed water through
a shower nozzle
bouncing off a metal tub.

The sun has risen, silently.

I somehow always expect to hear it creak and groan
in the well-worn motions of a task
so ancient and lasting
that maybe we don’t even notice the sounds;
the universe itself being such a well-oiled,
well-maintained cog works,
its machinations leaving us in a silence
we don’t even notice our own noisy bumbling
through the days and nights of our movement.

And remarkable even yet is the singing of birds,
pigeons and robins,
dingy with the dusts of city living.
Early morning light finds them perched on power lines
through which the juice of coffee makers and electric alarm clocks
flows in turbine generated currents.

The brick wall through my window begins to glow
as only orange and red cooked clay can,
vibrant and dull.

Coffee has brewed and I sip it slowly in new light
where somewhere away from this city
dogwood trees bloom fragrant, crucifix blossoms
and finches and towhees may sing sweeter songs
than the awkward soundings
of mocking birds on telephone lines
in the center of a rumbling city

yawning and cursing itself awake.

© 2008 by Shawn Pavey.  All rights reserved.