Friday, June 26, 2009

RECONNECTIONS, CIRCUMVENTIONS, CUT & PASTE

There’s a scar running
from my right ankle to my right testicle
where my right vein used to be; it must have been a long one.
The surgeons lifted it during the quadruple; they also heisted
a mammary vein, which you can’t see, and reconnected my heart
to keep the pump pumping.
There have been other physical alterations: teeth yanked,
gums opened and scraped to the bone; fingers crooked and bent
from sugar blues and four black gangerous toes pulled and flushed
down a toilet and into the sea for fish to eat.
There was a delicious agony in all that
like a love affair
gone bad,
repeatedly.
Yet this was better: freshly laundered sheets
for your asshole to sweat through; Gods vein of mercy,
morphine, to fondle the few remaining body parts left, and ease
the imaginative stew to percolate and simmer. You are leaving
the world in small quantities, and what’s left
is less functional,
less dangerous,
less important,
but no less real...
for you that is.

Kat, my wife, came near
to see what was up
with the writing.
Very depressing, I said.
At least you’re able to get it out, she said.
Not really, I said, but I’d rather be banging the typer
than taking this shit out on you.
Good idea, she said, I’m feeling blue, too, baby...and I might
be able to kill you, especially after you put my tit through this ringer, and,
in the shape you’re in, that shouldn’t be too hard...size
is no big deal, know what I mean?
Yeah, indeed I do, I said, and lifted her shirt.
Her auburn nipple was as close as pleasure dared to come
these days, and I simply put my mouth around her dark brown pinkish wonderful aureole and nursed.
She murmured slightly.
Baby, she said, Seinfeld is on at 9.
Huh, I said, I thought the murmuring was for me.
Just thinking, she said,
don’t take it personally.
No, I said,
of course not.

There is really only one way to end this day...or poem
for that matter...quietly,
very very quietly.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 1996

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