Letter to My Poet Friends in Quarantine by Shawn Pavey

Can we write enough poems about Django Reinhardt
It’s a question I keep asking myself
Knowing if you were here
Brothers and Sisters you would have treatise
At the ready and in triplicate
So when I hear those thin scratchy recordings
When the violin player takes the solo in
The World is Waiting for a Sunset
And Django way in the back is strumming faster
Than a hummingbird wing
And man he can just make that thing swing
And then in I Saw Stars how he’s just chopping
Chopping those strings in that mystic rhythm
And man can’t he just take you with him
Then when he steps out front
In Nuages each note drips out so sweet
That maybe we think this sadness will be forever
But let him slip into a little boogie groove
Like in Artillerie Lourde oh let him speak it true
How sometimes the ammo’s heavy baby
Sometimes you just have to lay it on down

Shawn Pavey has delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, bagged groceries, cut meat, laid sewer pipe, bussed tables, washed dishes, roofed houses, crunched numbers, rented cars, worked in hotels, worn an apron at Kinko’s, and been paid to write everything from résumés to music reviews.  Currently, he earns a living as an Executive Recruiter in Mission, KS where he lives with his wife and two worthless but adorable cats.  He’s hosted poetry readings in bars, coffee shops, haunted houses, bookstores, libraries, front porches, seedy motel rooms, and abandoned warehouses.  He is the author of Talking to Shadows (2008, Main Street Rag Press), Nobody Steals the Towels from a Motel 6 (2015, Spartan Press), and Survival Tips for the Pending Apocalypse (Spartan Press, 2019). He is a Co-founder and former Associate Editor of The Main Street Rag Literary Journal, and a former board member and officer of The Writers Place, a Kansas City-based literary non-profit.  His poems, essays, and journalism appear in a variety of national and regional publications.  A graduate of the University of North Carolina’s Undergraduate Honors Creative Writing Program, he likes his Tom Waits loud, his bourbon single-barrel, and his basketball Carolina Blue.