Saturday, October 28, 2017

MOST EVERYTHING


bugs me
these days:
a vein
resistant
to liquids,
a candy colored
blemish
of fear
in the cheeks
of a baby's smile.
The passage
of years
have set
my teeth
on edge:
The price
of toilet paper
or the toil
of buses
wailing
from the grim
silence of
travelers
risks
gunfire
and chafed
hearts.
My woman
keeps to
herself.
She has prepared
a dinner
she doesn't expect
to eat
with consequence.
Luckily,
I do not
come home.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Sunday, October 22, 2017

A SUNDAY SERMON


In my cock
I have
the nuclear codes:
Fuck it.

In my cunt
I have
your mother's touch:
Enter it.

My cock
validates
your worst suspicions;
my cunt
grants reprieves
& erases all doubts.
They allow you
to believe
you're connected
while granting
a few precious minutes
of death.

Let us pray.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Thursday, October 19, 2017

WHY I'M HERE


is obviously not
what I thought.
It's not to get
my way, but to
find a way;
it's not to stroke
an inflamed
and engorged
flabby ego,
but to leash it
to reason; it's not
to get my cock sucked
with whomever however
I choose and not to offer
my arm to the blind
& crippled at crossings.
It's not to sing
praises to the Lord
or His parasites or care
if Mother Mary gives a fuck
over what I'm doing or done.
It might be to listen
to Coltrane conducting
a Latin Mass or marry
words or wonder
why the Blackbird
is hungry today?
It might be to breathe
heroin fumes off concrete
in the Bronx or rub
an amputee's stumps?
It might be
to have dinner
with Puma
& talk baseball
and loves stranded
on third?
These are all legitimate
concerns.
Certainty
is for the dispossessed
who know
they need to eat
or pee.
Those,
like myself,
who have the luxury
of play, can be artists
of cowardice--like
wondering where
all that living goes
when it stops.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Monday, October 16, 2017

WHO KNOWS?


where they are?
or who they're with?
but I have
my suspicions:
one,
I'm pretty sure,
is fucking
a Cuban donkey
on some Havana side street;
another lies
under the sheets
in a psych unit
on a mountain side
in St. Moritz
waiting for a soulful skier
to fly onto her ward
& pirouette around her privates;
and still another,
lost in a memory dream
crosses a wet street
lifting her nun's robe
across her father's sternum.

Imagination dictates reality.

Most likely,
all the old ones,
and ones yet to come,
are battling
old battles.
Reminding themselves
they've misunderstood
themselves & their muses;
that ambivalence balanced
on the tip of her tit
gives her
enormous pleasure
and her sacrifices,
while tragic,
are trifles
as a white girl
sings Mississippi
juke joint blues.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Thursday, October 12, 2017

LIKE AN OLD MAN

For M

I fell asleep
on my couch
on my birthday
without warning:
one minute
here
next second
gone...
and then
she came.

She came
with a body
by Cezanne
and a Rabelaisian appetite.
I stuffed my dentures in,
wiped my chin from drool,
and got down
to business.

A few hours later
she left
no worse the wear.
I, on the other hand,
was richer by half,
smelling my thoughts
& fighting the curtain
coming down
too soon.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Monday, October 9, 2017

FUCK AND FUCKING WITH SEVENTY


When I was feeling-up Susie--
twirling her pink nipple
like a juggling fool
and inhaling
her adolescent powder or
gently chalking-up a pool cue,
or releasing a sixteen pound
black ball that rolled
down a slick alley and nestled
into the one/three pocket
turning five into five hundred,
or downshifting a Porsche
into a corner
doing fifty--
I hardly thought
about age or
infirmities,
those little gremlins
of egress and transgress
and impasse.

And now, suddenly,
here I am.
Most of the stuffing
come out
like an old pillow
and I still don't think
about what I can't do
but what I want to get done.

Tomorrow,
I will have been born
for the seventieth time.
And although more happened
during the first ten births
then my last sixty
(if what I hear is true),
and won't remember the final breath,
(if what I hear is true),
I have all the splendid mess
between. The gods
have been more than good to me,
they've been
generous...and
I want more.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

IN MEMORIAM REDUX


Tom Petty
& 58 other poor fucks
bought it
the other day.
No memo was sent.
No warning.
No admonition.
No nothing.

Today,
when you go
to your mailbox
& find nothing
you'll understand
life
is nothing else
if not fragile
& quixotic.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017