Sunday, June 17, 2012

HOPE

is dumb,
is bullshit,
not to mention
cruel. Better learn
to give it up
early or
at least
tame it
especially
when you smell
its sweet breath.
It's the devil's trick
that god has sanctioned.
If you let it
it will make you ill;
dizzy
with promise,
excitation,
expectation;
it will make you
pregnant
with a child
who hates you
and rapes you
against reason's
pitiful rightness.

Hope is a lover
with closed legs;
it is the cunt
of disappointment,
a cock full
of lies,
a watchman who sleeps,
the gatekeeper who watches
the dead sleep;
an armed guard
whose fingers
are arthritic.

Just give it up
I tell you.
Unless,
you're a better
and a degenerate one at that,
or a writer,
painter,
drunk,
a player
of music,
a spinner
of tales,
hooked on the risk,
the gamble,
defying the odds,
laughing at the odds,
and the vig at the end,
what the city, state, fed,
your wife or husband or mother
or father or priest or butcher
carves from the bone
of your success
matters less
than a pimple
on an elephant's
ass.
You need that mania
to be any good
at any of it. Don't complain
when the devil comes
knocking through god's
side door. Hope
is pricy.
There's only
one other choice:
a Smith & Wesson
against the temple,
but even that,
sometimes,
knowing that the door
is never completely shut
might be enough
to keep you here.
It's worked for me
and some others I know.
Why not
you?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2012

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