Monday, October 31, 2011

I'VE PRETENDED

to be whole
when I was fractured;
pretended to heal
when I was stitched.
I was a poet
before I knew
what poetry was.
I seduced
myself;
I studied
what I wasn't.
I won
seventh games;
threw hard
like Sandy
and batted
like The Duke.
To each face
I became
a different face
and to each face
I listened
and I lied.
Survival
is a hard won
art. The ants
know this as do those
jailed inside
their own fences.
We do not need a day
set aside
to pretend.
I've bravely
injected the unknown
into my arm
and woke with women
crazier than me
and grew crazier
at the gods reprieve
and pretended
this somehow was preferable
to the other.

I have given little
and expected much
though you'd never
know it. Those insurrections
were played to a mirror
of a narrow landscape
in a land
that is uninhabited
by hearts,
just masks.
And this is the day of masks:
jester masks, king masks, queen masks,
slut masks, masks of bones, masks of gods,
masks of idiots, of animals, beasts, gremlins,
masks of love, of lust, of fealty and prohibitions.
I've pretended
I was me
all my life.
I can take today
off.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2011

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