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

ALWAYS ON

guard.
Studied.
Composed.
Projecting
something
natural,
unforced,
cool.
Never
at ease.
Watched.
Judged.
Criticized.
Commented on.
Playing
to an audience
somewhere
out there
outside,
not
necessarily
alive
either.

Waiting
for the lights
to dim
if not
go out.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

SO YOU WANNA BE IN PICTURES?

I had my ass parked
on a black, wrought-iron rail
which bordered my garbage cans,
smoking a cigarette & waiting
on a steady thing: a job, a woman,
immortality or my clothes
to dry and settled on
finishing the smoke & hanging
for my underwear
& bedsheets for the week next
& smelling the snow
which was promised
for later on that evening
when I heard tears ten feet
to my right.
I took a drag
& swiveled my head
& saw a pretty college co-ed,
her face scrunched-up
balling into her cell phone.
I tried my best
to eavesdrop
but my hearing is going
the way the rest of my body is:
south. I tried again,
failed again & waited.
I suppose you really get the impression
these days, that no one is around when
you're on these devices; self-consciousness
doesn't enter into it. I'm of the age
where I think people are spying on me
when alone in my pad, but that's me.
But when she passed
I could hear her say,
"What am I going to tell my dad?"
Ten or twenty years ago, I thought,
I could tell her; I could give her
the benefit of all my knowledge &
hard earned experience &
a healthy dose of bullshit
with the idea, or plan,
of fucking her
then & there or
the not too distant future.
Don't get angry--
it's an all too human ploy.
I watched her & her jelly-limbed legs
wobble & teeter down my block
& didn't notice a young man
who approached me from the other side:
"Excuse me, sir," he began.
My head swiveled back east.
He'd disturbed a poem
that was taking shape.
"What?" I asked.
"The director of this film we're shooting
would like you to be in it."
"What are you talking about?"
"We're on a shoot...all these trucks...
we're filming a scene and he'd like you
to be in it, smoking a cigarette the way
you just did. Just smoke another cigarette
and we'll film it."
I looked around and sure enough
there were film trucks up & down my block.
Nothing strange; someone films something often
in my part of Greenwich Village.
"How much?"
"Eh, how much what?" he inquired.
"How much bread would I get? Money? You know, coins?"
"Money? Nothing. No money, but you'd be in the movie...maybe."
"Who gives a fuck?"
He moved off
& so did I. A mistake
I know. Another part
misread.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016