"YOU'RE SURROUNDED:

For Jimmy Cagney & Tom Signorelli

Come out
with your hands up."

"Fuck you.
I ain't comin out.
Come get me."

(And they will,
yes, they will.)

Everything constricts;
you're inside the Boa.
You swallow
and feel the fish
bones stuck
in your gullet.
There are no good memories.
Even when you thought
you were so smart,
so slick,
so much
the rogue
with girls and women
and the art
of persuasion
it now chokes you
with imbecility.
All the breasts
you've nuzzled,
all the legs
thrown over
your shoulders,
all the laughs
and ease after
the spring's sparks
had settled refuse
to reverberate.

It is a bill
you've run out on
they've come to collect;
a prerequisite
you've never taken
out of fear,
out of spite,
mockingly stares back
like Nietzsche's abyss.
All the "time" you've thought
you've killed
comes back
to avenge its murder.

We hole up
beside our barbed-wire
selves. Blue smoke
settles over corpses
plucked bare; our bones
will be bleached
by the hands of lovers
and laid bare and sold
like Indian artifacts.
You can't turn around
without getting cut.
Yet,
coming out
is not an option.
There still is a sliver
of light and the sound
of mice dancing a jig
underneath the floorboards.
And that's enough.
It has always been enough;
Enough for then
and enough for now.

Check your bullets,
steady your hand,
and take
aim.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013