Thursday, October 31, 2019

HALLOWEEN


My mother
dresses me
as myself;
I'm confused enough,
she tells me.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

I WON'T PAY FOR YOUR LOVE,

For P, a black cat prowling...

but I'll gladly pay for your book.
Some work
is too dear
while others are,
as they say,
"on the arm."

"Love," a miserable shape-shifter,
is maleable, wily, untrustworthy,
dangerous in its excess
& yet more so
in its absence;
it's unhinged, schized,
juiced with questions,
& arid of answers...
& always,
always, costs
much more than you ever thought.

While a book
no matter how twisty,
no matter how difficult,
is solid, its pages glued,
its letters made of concrete
spawns words which spawns sentences
which the eye can see & digest until
it makes sense
or doesn't; you're enriched
or you move on. But
in all accounts,
if the writer is serious,
you know that those words
were fought over, paid for,
in the only currancy art knows:
blood.

And so, my dear,
if I love you,
or you me--
that's our problem.
It's our Coney Island funhouse
or madhouse
or doghouse
of the mind.
But your book exists
outside that as yours,
your peculiar take
on this carnival,
as a testament
of a survival
outside the bounds
of a pedestrian matrimony;
an affirmation
in the boldest sense
of a life lived
despite the odds
of an early exit,
as revenge
for a life lived
without permission
accepting payment
like the grandest of hooker's acknowledgement
of just what a fantastic lover she is.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH BEAUTY


that only torture brings out,
I've made sure
to have stockpiled
enough pain annuities
to last a lifetime.
My memory bank
welcomes the lash
& the leash
of new subscribers,
but should I see
a masochistic downturn
I simply tune in
to my favorite stations
and taste the blood
of a finely aged betrayal.

Johnny Keats
waxing poetic
on a Grecian Urn
shook the Brooklyn
off its perch
and into the steely crabgrass
where the hanging-judge
and the lotus-eater
hold court.

To all those
who've hurt or crippled me,
I cannot thank you enough.
To all those
who've fooled or betrayed me,
my hat is off to you;
you have lived far past
your expiration date,
but torture me still.
You've birthed this poem
and those which came before
and those which come after.
It's a signless road,
but well-traveled.
I can find it in the dark.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

Monday, October 7, 2019

EVIL IS DELICIOUS


From filching
a penny candy
when you were a kid,
to fucking
your best friends wife
yesterday morning
when you still had spirit,
the lure of being bad
surges like a jolt of adrenaline
into the fisheye of a bottom feeder.

From the furtive glance
into your classmate's answers,
to the minutely planned
afternoon bank heist,
to the first time
you copped heroin
on uptown blackened streets,
the steady drip
of transgression's nectar
prickles the heart
and pumps the testicles.

Evil has so many flavors
to slake the thirst
of a sandpaper tongue;
to satisfy the hunger
of a righteous bloated belly
pretending in their noble robes
or street urchins
lurching from a wooden cross.

These moves
& counter moves,
this crisscrossing
of God's wires,
mimicing the raven & the wolf
naturally fucking
a Grand Vision of deceit
funnels into view
all that makes life worth living:
renegades in love/a reckless art.
It turns desire
into mania;
it boils the blood
turning its watercolors of propriety
into a lustrous oil slick;
and its why I still covet
your cunt, your redolent cunt of gushing liquids,
into a glorious pool of sin,
a sin that welcomes
its sinner
& blesses
his arrival.

Norman Savage
Greensich Village, 2019

POETRY


like a worm
inching into the bird's beak
these years swallowed
& turned into an excrement
of words.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019