Tag: Social Justice

Bio: 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 where lives.
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, and many others.
A collaboration with Parisian photographer Julie Peiffer has given rise to “Riverlights” and can be found on Fb @ Riverlights. Amitin’s poetry can also be discovered on FB and Instagram sites bearing his name.


Marvin

Hey man, What’s Goin’On? Manrique asks
he slides into the ripped passenger seat
of the beat burgundy Nissan
parked in a run-down Hollywood strip mall

April ’84 – hot LA
My head on the steering wheel
ghost pale – charcoal clouds overhead

Manrique cries
what’s goin’ on
fresh off his 7/11 twinkie run

Horns blaring
for us to hightail out of the
thin slice parking space

Marvin..he’s DEAD
I whisper
heard it on the radio

Marvin Gaye?
Yeah
oh Mercy Me

Filicide- his pentacostal cross-dressing preacher papa
sprayed a bullet right through Marvin’s gold record
broken-chequered cocaine-stained heart

Just a few miles from here

Golden voice so young so great so done
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

Alabama ’32

At the doorway to the Lodge doling out holy praises
nurse Eunice Rivers, 33 slight, stooped

Raised poor black
her father with sundown eyes ‘neath a sharecropper’s tight screw
heat blister days, she college educated
designated a liaison between the town of Tuskegee
and The Lodge, a secretive hidaway in the woods

Ms. Rivers had seen a sign in the wind
landed on a tree where strange fruit hung and
Stars Fell on Alabama

A wind carrying a CDC propped experiment
A wind shifty as a slide’s snail trek up a bottleneck guitar

Blind to the racism around her
position and authority at hand
Rivers ran

Chanting a solemn hymn with evil beats
to six hundred
poor blacks arriving at the Lodge bused from Tuskegee
volunteers to participate in a pilot study on syphillis

The payoff, the sacred promise of free health care and
free burial insurance (whichever first)
a ‘blood’ experiment to last just a few short months

Bad blood they called it

The Tuskegee volunteers- a tribe that
wandered the dark deserts of deceit for forty years
invisible shackles- a nightfire dance of thieves

Penicillin had burst on the scene like shooting star Jesus
the needle never fell on The Lodge

Observation camp Mother-American style
CDC, center of disease, center for life on the cheap

Over a hundred volunteers died or went blind
Alabama Blues playing
on God’s sweet radio
a storm rattling passing holy minstrel tents

One small shot for man, one huge boon for Medical chicanery
for further eradicating or denigrating people of color
dying gamblers who’d lay their aces on a game of big lie

And here in the wake of the Purple Shack Show Twilight
African villages no mask, no distance, low count covid nights,
far east of port lights reflecting off the dark Gulf waters
where Stars Fell on Alabama