Wednesday, December 30, 2015

GETTING ANOTHER SHOT AT IT


Yesterday I had my fingerprints taken.
Human Resources will call me
sometime after the first
to give me a start date.
I don't know why
the gods have been so good to me:
jobs, women &, at times
Tennessee's strangers.
Most jobs & women I fucked up
while some fucked me up; why
the brass ring has come round
again--I don't know.

In fact, "why?" anything
I don't know.

But come January
I'll be going
to the Bronx
where I've only been
a few times before:
the old stadium
when the NY Giants
played in NY
& The Yanks
who built it;
the other times
I snuck in & out
to some south Bronx shit hole
to cop heroin when Fox
& Simpson Streets where known
as Ft. Apache.

I'll try to do
what I've done well before:
help some poor sonofabitch
and their family cope
with a bad hand
they were dealt
way before they knew
they were even in
a poker game.
I feel good
about that.
I think I can
do it
without trampling
on their ego
or succumbing
to my own.
Humility happened
grudgingly: my life
got ugly. No longer
was I a catch;
I was the caught.

But I got lucky:
some went to bat
for me. I owe it
to them to get up
to the plate
& not try
to hit it
out of the park,
but only try
to make
contact.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

A DISMAL END TO AN ASHEN YEAR, 2015


This town has no juice.
There isn't a buzz, not
a hum; it's leaden like
death. A pallor of gray
ash. Broadway is dim;
a yellow wattage darkens
the streets. Children
are dragged into toy stores.
The Salvation Army plays
Wagner on their bells.

Perhaps, it's Paris
or San Bernardino,
Chicago or The West
Bank or The Congress
or The President
who looks like
he hasn't gotten pussy
in years; tired
from the prom
from the promise
from what is
not? Perhaps,
it's constantly looking
for sales and bargains
because there are no
sales or bargains--
everything costs more
than what they're worth?
A collective reckoning.
A hundred and forty characters...
and you're dead.
An attention span of fleas.

I've gotten emails,
but no Christmas cards;
I've sent out emails,
but haven't licked a stamp.
It is company without flesh;
sentiment without breath.

I'm sure many people feel differently.
There will be champagne flutes aplenty
aloft in The Hamptons & Fifth Avenue
& Sutton Place come the thirty-first.
Some men will suckle an enormous breast
while thousands more are jailed
like a household pet through endless nights.
Those are not the ones I mean.
It's the fat middle that keeps getting fatter
that feasts on the offal that spins
off the techno butcher house of synthetics
that pawns itself off as real meat
that plays with me.
More people
have less;
more people
have less;
more people
have less;
and less people
have more
and more
and more.
"Will the machine gunners
please step forward."

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Thursday, December 24, 2015

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST


Two years ago
I had "a date
with the executioner."
She winged her way
from the north
& settled in my crib
for a week
of mad love
& madder hopes.
For me
it was a gift
I didn't want
to question
I only wanted
to enjoy.
In less than two months
it was over: I went up
to her crib; she handed
me my balls
in a box & sent
me packing--
devastated,
humiliated,
blown-up
without a
compass or
much of a reason
to go on...
but of course,
we have to
go on,
and do.

I still love her
and love women;
I love
their skin,
their perfume,
their way
of doing,
& their way
of being done;
I love their
bodies, their
nuanced way
of seeing
while ignoring;
their special
angers & regrets.
But this year
has not been kind
to me: a job
that does not pay
my rent; hours of
waiting for assistance:
food stamps, arrears,
interviews, paperwork.
Days mangled. Yet
I've never felt
more accomplished.
The words
have never
betrayed me; the writing
has never stopped.
"The blood-jet of poetry"
has splashed on the page:
my blood, your blood, her blood.
I can see our bodies splayed
waiting on the word's knife.

In January I start
a new gig. I'm happy
to be able to afford
my pad. Debts
will be repaid
over time; I'll look
at women and not
feel guilty--I can afford
another mistake.
And her
living
in her own hell
I'll flirt with.
I know it will do me no good,
but there's now less of me
to kill.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Sunday, December 20, 2015

CHRISTMAS EVE, 1954

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHKnvwoGg0Y

Five niggers
gathered
to play
nigger music
in a non-nigger house
in New Jersey.
They were cool
with that.
The rest of the world
was still white:
Brown Vs. Board
was a colored victory;
Jackie & Willie
were great colored ballplayers,
a credit to their race,
but were harbingers
(and still "colored.")
Cigarettes were twenty-five cents a pack.
A drink a buck.
Cap of heroin was fifty cents.
Brown band leaders
sick from a night
of no pay
& bad food
in a cheap
Chinese fish shack,
leaned into blondes
with bad skin.
Crew-cuts & skinny ties
told the tale
of a country heated
by recent wealth
and power. Ike smiled.
Yet underneath
the green golf carpet
mischief brewed.

In this Van Gelder home
St. Nick
had to,
if he had a mind,
jimmy his way in;
crazy voodoo artists,
brought their own gift,
were at work
while their drunken painter friends
lapped at the bowls in the bowels
of The Cedar Bar & San Remo's.

Percy plucked & walked rhythm's spine;
Cluck brushed a high hat;
Miles, precise & dark, played with blackness;
Bags danced;
and Monk, beautifully unhinged, splashed color through his fingers.

These times
are terribly light.
And still white.
Crazy art
is bought & paid for
before it can do anything
like breathe.

I was seven then,
almost seventy now.
I celebrate the birth
of something.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

SANTA'S A PRICK


for keepin my baby
all to himself
tucked away
& toasty
sipping
a Hot
Toddy.
Next thing you know
he'll be taking
a dump
down my chimney
this Christmas Eve.
I'll have a pail out
& shovel
just in case...
and a shotgun
for his pale
white ass.

Jewish Alzheimer's
my diagnoses:
I forget everything,
except grudges.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Monday, December 14, 2015

THE TICK OF TOCK


cannot be
reclaimed.
It vanishes
& shape shifts
into an easy
old shoe
dance
of lies.

I loved
that woman.
But can't
be sure
who
that woman
is
now.
Or
who she was
then.

Only
a refrain
returns.
Who wrote it
or sung it
I can't be sure.

Years
have turned
while the wind
scratches
its dead
from branches.

Soon it will be dry.
And then moist.
A jack-o-lantern smile
will beckon.
And then jingles.
And I'll be me
and you, you.
What could be
never was.
Perfectly
empty, allowing
a metronome
of sorrow
to play
over
& over
& over
again.


Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Sunday, December 13, 2015

RUSSIA HAS NOT BEEN KIND


to its artists.
Never has.
But being kind
to artists
is not necessarily
a good thing--
just ask Americans
who get killed
by the fawning over
fame that this country
spits up.
Still,
had I born born
on the vodka tundra,
I would have been
in a gulag
or two
by now
--if I'd stayed alive.
And while that might
have been good
for my art
& the folks
I've fucked-over,
there were a few girls
& women who would have
grown old & died
without my charms
& many good graces
a laugh can provide.

I've gotten emails
from all over the world,
but not from The Red Square--
where a lot of my readers live.
For the sake of the gods
don't write me,
keep breathing,
keep reading,
keep writing,
keep painting,
keep dancing,
keep singing,
& most of all:
keep fucking
everybody
except
(only a little bit),
yourself.
And that,
my comrades,
will make me,
very
very
happy.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Friday, December 11, 2015

"NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I'VE SEEN"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQzlzH5wymc

Is true
enough
for all
of us,
in our
time
everywhere,
but only
one
fills
our
silence
with that
pain
full
absolution.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

MISHA'S DANCE OF DEATH ON HIS OWN RUSSIAN SOIL


My age now,
Misha is,
nearer than further,
astride the grave,
a Beckett waltz
on his breath
he dances
in Brodsky's shadow.
How the old dowagers flock
toward the memory
of his beautiful body
and find only
decrepitude instead.

Almost forty-five years ago
in a loft on Chambers Street
I sat like a schoolchild
watching the clash of egos.
Cecil and Misha
(and poor little Heather
in a corner) cornered
by their art
trying to birth a marriage.

Our beginnings are our ends.
We know this,
but don't really know this,
until we see the flesh
hanging from the bone.

Twenty years ago
I saw Cecil at The Vanguard.
A solo performance.
It sounded like a late Beethoven sonata,
a summing up. Now Misha.
And now the dowagers
who no longer smile
at their memories.
"Art" never was
supposed to be
entertainment.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Monday, December 7, 2015

PAIN HAS NEVER FELT THIS GOOD


I've been trying
for years now
to get away
from her
gravitational field;
I do not have
the propulsion
necessary
or, perhaps,
I lack
the will?
No matter
why; it is
what it is.
Everything I do
or don't do
I do
or don't do
with her
in mind.
It's madness
most beatific
in a wood dark
and winding.

There has been
explorations
of different planets,
different bodies,
different climates,
different names.
I've been indifferent
to their danger if,
indeed, they presented
danger at all.
Somewhere in my core
I must have known
that her madness
would arouse and inspire
my own and give rise
to a poetry of fevers.

It is the mirror
of adolescence
that I stare into.
A demon stares back:
young, heedless,
reckless (but alive!)
Pain has never felt
this good.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Friday, December 4, 2015

THE UNREPENTANT ROMANTIC


If you don't talk to me
right now, I'm going to
slit my wrists.

I cradled
the phone
and left.

Love dies
hard. Just
ask me.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Thursday, December 3, 2015

NEXT TIME I'M GOING TO LISTEN


to my mama:
I'm going to stay in school
without cutting classes; I'm going
to graduate
with a degree
in something
beside bullshit;
I'm going to take
the Civil Service test
and cheat
if I have to,
or get a job
in a bank or write
corporate mush
about picnics
and new employees
and their families
and the boss' best
and biggest hardon;
I'll take tickets
in a movie theater
or hand out tickets
in traffic court
and I'll marry
early
a Jewish girl
and have Jewish kids
with names like Harvey
or Irene or Norman
or Beth or Joel
and I'll talk talk talk
about silverware patterns,
or wallpaper or indoor plumbing,
and I'll listen listen listen
to slights & betrayals & rotten kids
and I'll work overtime
every chance I get and get saving bonds
and insurance policies and a practical car that seats six with room for a dog, a small dog, a dog that yaps,
and I'll see her family and their teachers and do anything anything anything not to hear her voice and their voices and I'll go to the bathroom and I'll close the door and I'll look and see if my testicles are still attached and wonder who they belong to and how long they'll dangle there without dropping any further down into the bowl.

You'll see,
I can do it.
I'll listen,
I promise,
I'll listen.
You believe me
don'tcha?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

THERE WERE VAMPIRES


sucking out
the rest of their lives
as they stood in line
at the Bowery Mission.
Their gums swollen & red
& receding into the back
of their skulls;
their teeth broken
looking like rusted serrated knives
of benign tastes
and neutered utility.
The drool
flowed from their black holes
and pooled on their chests.
They huddled and waited
for blood: sixty nine cents
worth of Port. Aged. Wise.
Indifferent to the crosses
hung for the holiday season.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015