The Moment Creation Appears
It comes a snarling night skeleton
beating time in overdrive
green grotto eyes
atomic heartbeat highway
Flesh sneaks in
its own clockless hour
Another Saturday Night
Wine is a bordello
a slap stream sip of
strip-down illusions
Great assumption cleared by
mustached clouds of heaven
hullabaloo sneeze box
Art Pepper at the roundtable
King prodding his sax
in the soft muff parlors of
stone midnite-villes
Sun of humility
rises from an unconscious
breezing me back home
Girl With The Chopin Fingers
Fingers, wild spiders
climbing Mount Chopin
Grenades exploding
her sundown eyes firelighting
crème de la creme chandelier houses
upper Midwest ’30s
Lizst, Mendlesohn
fountains of ivory pink rain
One day
she refused the refrain of her
Mother’s ceaseless hammering
Mary hurled her ill- tempered pills
into the Minneapolis chill winter night
where in an icy grave they lay
Good girls don’t behave this way
Two oversized men white oversized coats
stormed the door
Mary singing mad-woman blues
serpentine prodigy all of twenty-three
hauled off in the eternal fog debris
threw the switch, blew her to eternity
Mary carrying lanterns in idyllic swamps
died a muddied soul
stomped to death by the bulls of Hell
ripened mores, medicine flimflam jubilee’s
Lizst, Chopin, Mendlesohn
full house empty stage, I see
Heard a chorus go up
ringing my fledgling buttercup ears
“You gotta get that music out of that kid’s head.”
After these mandolin curtain calls
Aunt Mary’s face in a black amber wind
Dylan Has Blue Eyes
Dylan has blue eyes
blue as acid rain falling down iron mines
Minnesota
he stole away in the steel toe snowy night
Tangled up in winter-howl New York
on the cusp of a new blue rodeo parade
Courage in spades
Fire not for sale
Picking up pieces of
collapsed post-war wharfs
it’s all over now… and then
JFK bullets signed, sealed, delivered
Dylan creak-eyed ragtime up forgotten stairs
volumes of fireplace nirvanas
till daybreak in lonely whistlestop shadows
While below the seedy snow- swept windowpanes
Cinderella swept the night’s sad confetti
Diner’s neon-ready
Dylan ready to hop the next passing train
to crumble town
Hurtling past knaves in the boiler pot shades
on the tombstone heels of Woody, of Kerouac
he carved his plot like that
Dylan’s blue eyes
seen Hurricane Carter do blasphemous time
Emmett Till dug from southern soup brines
Hattie Carroll wrong end of a white man’s cane
society hotel’s big bright flame
Feral bombers flying grease-pit nights
half-scrawled innocence claimed in a rich man’s parade
angels dancing with star spangled tears
And she awakens… hears the tracks rumble
lifts her finger to the wind
knows what direction he’s in, far from that
bluelight dream hotel
Ode to Jimmy Cobb
ragged on the docks halfway ‘tween winter and spring equinox, rum tumbling clock
strikes jazz midnight, a tribute to jimmy cobb, storm quiet gratitude – seas sleek as
Neptune smokin’ slow baked blues.. swingin’ fine, arpeggiation sensations in slo-mo,
sax track urchins blowin’ high above chilly night Parisian shores space deep as breath
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, before moving to Paris, France in 2009.
Named International Beat Poet Laureate 2020-2021, Amitin’s poems have been published in California Quarterly, Poetry Pacific, North of Oxford, PoetryontheLake, Love Love Magazine, Litterateurrw, The Dreaming Machine, Red Door, JerryJazzMusician, and New Generation Beats Anthology’s 2023 and 2024. His debut poetry collection “Shadow Morphine Dress” has just been released and is available at Anxiety Press and Amazon.
