Saturday, January 28, 2017

A LITTLE MORE DOPE, PLEASE


Got enough kindness,
thank you very much.
Food, uhuh,
got plenty of that, too.
Money? OK
with that.
A woman? You kiddin?
I'll pass.
Got my four walls,
some paper,
and a Bic--
if I need em.
It's dreams, man,
that I'm short of;
and I'm getting old-old,
so old that my old dreams
have gotten tired, too,
and can't make the leap
into my head
without some help.
So...
pass the dope, wouldya?
I've got the spike&spoon,
I've got the cotton&belt,
a glass of water rests
on my table & I've got the will
to sleep&encourage
rebellion
damning what separates me
from the dimming light.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

MARY TYLER MOORE IS DEAD


and I can't say I'm sorry.
I spoke to her once
while she was in Canada
filming some bullshit
and I was holed up
in my Greenwich Village pad
bloody and bandaged and minus
four toes and still trying
to dream and she
was in a phone booth
with a second or two,
she told me,
between takes.
I'd tried for years
to get my memoir to her: Confessions
Of An Uncontrolled Diabetic.
I tried through my doctors,
her publicist, her husband's colleagues,
and finally through her assistants.
The years were 1982 through '85
and she was living in the San Remo.
I was convinced that between the insulin shocks,
insulin shots, piss testing, food deprivations,
depressions from sugar highs, anger from the lows,
a commonality of Brooklyn, doctors, fears and
foreboding, she'd get behind the work if
she read it, though I never particularly liked
her work: too pretty, too perky, too sweet,
too American, but, hey, she held some ins
to my outs.
She was worth a shot.
Getting published,
getting validated,
getting out of this thing
called "life" was worth
whatever lies
I had to tell.
An actor friend of mine
knew one of her assistants
and so I traipsed up to the San Remo
and dropped the book off for her
with the militarily clad doorman.
After a year
I forgot about it.
And then a phone call
on a rain slicked day.
She was probably sorry
she didn't get my answering machine.
After my hello
she told me who she was.
"Sorry," she said,
"I can't get involved with this."
I just held the receiver.
"Best of luck," she said,
and hung up.
I could hear her voice catch.
I heard, "I'd really like to, but..."
kinda tone.
I'd suspected the work cut too close
to Mary's bone and wasn't surprised
a decade later when she wrote about
her alcoholism and the less savory
parts of her so called charmed life.
"Fuck her," I said at the time
and went back to what I did best:
hide
behind words
& substances.

I might have another eleven years
to go--give or take--and am not displeased
about the arc my life has taken
before and after Mary.
Redford must have sensed, too,
her drunken selfishness and filmed it.
Really,
it was her most honest role.
I should know:
I've played it
once or twice
myself.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Monday, January 23, 2017

WITHOUT THINKING


a hand finds
the back of my neck
and casually rests
soothing the wrinkles
inside my head
with her fingers
brushing
the tops of drums.
How lovely
is that in
the early evening
as the madness of the day
airs itself out
and a gentleness
eases itself in--
like listening to Al Green
Backing Up the Train.
You pray a little
you will never speak again
or hear any language that can't
be sung.
You know,
of course,
you've done nothing
to deserve this kindness
except live
through another day
of hell.
"Baby,
that feels so good,"
you want to say,
but don't.
Instead you note
the passage of time:
why it feels this miraculous
at seventy
as it did
at seventeen;
and there I am
still bewildered
at how women know
where to touch you
and when.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Friday, January 20, 2017

THIS INAUGURATION DAY IS A DAY


for Monk,
Thelonious
that is; it's
a WELL YOU NEEDN'T day,
a NUTTY day,
a STRAIGHT, NO CHASER, day,
a BLUE MONK, day.
Turn off
the news,
the TV.
Do not
read.
Forget
what you know.
Give yourself
over
to the dots
that can't be
connected,
but
(somehow)
are.
Arm yourself
with a chuckle,
a knowing grin.
And once sated
move forward
into the breach
and take up
the fight
again.

Norman Savage
Bronx, NY 2017

Sunday, January 15, 2017

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE


Working with the addicted,
the deranged, the borderline,
the schizo affective, the bi-polar,
the recently released, incarcerated,
the twitchy, the nervous, the traumatized,
the treated mercilessly, the tortured,
the stigmatized, the one's whose first word
was no, whose innards boast the picket fences
of fear, too early and too complicated and too monstrous
to look through and too briar rich to get through without
bleeding to death is almost as hard
as loving them.

I should know:
For fifty years
I've made a living
off them & tonight
I'm taking one out
to dinner.

I myself
am one
& divide
against
myself
as tides
come in
& try
to drown
me.

There is something rousing
about jousting with impossibility;
something stirring
when the strings
are struck
in the hearts
of masochists.
Sometimes
they even summon things
of beauty.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Friday, January 13, 2017

SCRUBBING THE STAINS


cannot help
but leave a stain
but that stain
is smooth
like a chalk outline
around a dead body.
It's been hard
work but I've had help:
my ex has never called;
the nut from the north
has kept her distance;
I've had no uninvited
knocks in the middle of
the night; my parents
are dead and I've buried
"the bad
with their bones;"
and my brother
has trouble
of his own
that I,
unfortunately,
can't help with.
All in all
this past year
has been better
than good
for me; so good
that at times I believe
something bad is close
at hand.

I still make mistakes,
plenty of them, but
they are new,
too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

SOMETIMES IT'S SO STAGGERING ALL YOU CAN DO IS WEEP


There is a point
rusted inside you
that is reached
when words collide
with your history;
they freeze
& bleed
into your next breath.
Time dissolves.
Pain
which was muted
& runny congeals
& engulfs.
You are lost
inside your flesh
desperate for air;
your defenses
useless;
your rationalizations
in neat boxes
of misery;
your reason
banished; your control
dismissed
as folly.

Hold tight,
my friends.
This visitor
doesn't stay
for long
because
it never left.
It's just reminding you
it's hungry.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Thursday, January 5, 2017

"LOADED"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NwKZ9ZsgGA

Been listening
since new years
forty-seven years ago;
I was twenty-two &
loaded myself: my guns
were loaded; my body
was loaded; the times
were loaded & The Velvets
were loaded. I thought
I was dangerous I thought
I'd change literature I thought
I'd fuck endless women through endless nights and take endless drugs through endless dreams and thread my way through this endless life and bend this life to my will...
nothing bent
except me.

I still listen
to "Loaded,"
but now straight
as a steel rod
without its steel sister;
my gun
shot blanks
and life
was my master
while I
was its
masturbator.

Here, have
a listen.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH


it all comes back:
skinny ties,
berets,
goatees,
unfiltered cigarettes,
jazz,
existentialism...
all that stuff:
"Pour soi,"
"En soi,"
"Hell is other people,"
"condemned to be free"...
you know,
RESPONSIBILITY
FOR YOUR OWN ACTIONS kind of shit.
(And maybe another world war,
and devastation death rubble
and bread lines soup lines Maginot Lines
and despots dictators demigods de facto
and foolishness & fucking
and more than a Guernica abstract
and bad teeth & misery so thick
you won't be able to piss
without a bishop or rabbi
to direct the stream.

(And
I could be wrong.

(But
I'm not
am I?

(And you don't think so
either,
do you?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

STEALTHLY, A THROWBACK MOVES FORWARD


She was
a white-gloved
street whore;
Picasso's mistress,
Isadora's partner,
Baudelaire's muse,
a lower east side
gutter hugger
when there was
a lower east side
to fight the chill
inside a world
full of spoons
& white cotton.
Now she fights
off dementia &
boils by forming
words in a darkness
of her own making
& singing to lights
of her own choosing.
She's pulp
in all its
glory.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Sunday, January 1, 2017

THE YEAR CHANGES, BUT THE UNDERWEAR REMAINS THE SAME

For Puma, with love...


Men still follow
behind women
quietly
as they are led
into supermarkets,
clothing stores,
restaurants,
movie theaters,
looking aimlessly about
as they submit
to the leash,
if not the lash,
of the female
& lean
into their own
confusion.

Jesus, too,
must have noticed
the Jaws of Death
when he followed
that old whore
to her corner
and watched her
throw-out her line
& began to fish
for her daily bread.
He looked about
trying to believe
he was concentrating
on something divine
but knowing it was
rejection
that had him coming
back for more.

Too often
I find myself
reading ingredients
on the backs of cans
while the woman I'm with
moves forward
with our lives.
I've been lucky
having always someone
who knows
how to dance.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 201