DOPE THAT'S BEEN STEPPED ON, AND STEPPED ON...

Let those silly romantics yearn
for days long ago
when beds held a virginal bliss
of a love yet to be unspooled
and unspoiled
by our all too human delusion
of a life in its earliest embryo
of innocence & safety.

America, too, the idea of,
has been cut, stepped on,
so many times,
you barely feel it, now,
except to feel cheated.
Once, pure, perhaps,
in the tents of chiefs
and those with lust
in their hearts
for adventure
carved trails over mountains
rock-ribbed from shore
to praire to shore
carrying banjos singing
with disbelief
and daring--
now reduced to a mathematics
naked of forests & rivers,
indulging earth's moods
whether scorched or flooded,
holding aces & eights
inside capillaries of sin,
tricked-out on Saturday nights
fucking any floppy breasted
sacrificial whore in sight.

Instead I'll choose to remember
going uptown to discover
dope so good
it was sold in fat
deuces & tray bags,
cut so honest
it bordered on religion
allowing me
to come down
from the cross
and up to sit in God's palm
amidst his opium breath
and golden spun dreams.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

A MODEST SOLUTION

Have Ivanka
suck some street dick
& let Tiffany take notes.
Move Eric
& Donny, Jr
into an SRO
& give em 16 bucks
a month in Food Stamps;
force Barron
to choose
another name--
these are easy to do.
What's a little harder,
but promises to be
more interesting,
is moving all "the swells"
on Park, Lex, & 5th Avenues
to Pig Hollow Mississippi,
Crapalachia, the inbred mountains
of Kentucky while shuffling
some pig slop Alabama/Arkansas/Georgia north,
into the main line of Boston,
Philly, Riverdale, Scarsdale,
overturn Montana into Louisiana,
spill the bucket of blood that's Texas
into Maine's aortic valve...
you know, Mongrelize! Blood
doesn't turn up its nose;
let there by blood jets of poetry.
Shake it up baby,
twist&shout Isley Brothers style.

Can this American flag bullshit.
Give it a rest. Stop talking.
It's bad, it's stale, we've seen
this movie. Sleep with a new mate.
Smell a new smell. Taste something
that awakens your tongue.
For god's sake:
Make It New.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

A PALL

has descended
over me; I struggle
to do anything
except move my fingers
over the keys and let
whatever flies & lands
in my head create the lie
of exercise & movement.

Depression is gifted
for the young;
melancholy
for the lovelorn.
I am neither.
I am like my words:
lugubrious labored
leaden lonely.
A shroud covers
my TV, anchors of folly
slither over its face.

I'm waiting for the earth
to turn over
us and the intrepid worm
become our jailers.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

THE LOVE SONG OF DONALD J. TRUMP

Let us go then
you & I
as the country is chained
around a megalomaniac's thigh
like sheep
about to be
buggered.

Let us go
through flaccid streets
under silken sheets
of puffed bravado
and stubby fingered falsetto
to where madmen wait
sucking an empty space
like prunes within a vacated bowel.

In the room the blowhards come & go
Tickling each other's assholes.

There will be time, there will be time
to grow a dick
and fornicate
with a stranger tonight...
or each other's mate
even when their there...or ain't.

No, I am not Nikita
nor was meant to be,
am a jester and a saint
but would not hesitate
to drop a shoe
upon his pate.

We have lingered too long
celibate and lick the salt
upon the state.
So roll up
your sleeves and part your hair
and wonder how our fine creatures
only sit and stare.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

VD ENTERPRISES

I don't mind
that Vladimir
& Donald divvy up
the world
as if they were cutting
into a ripe cunt begging
for their mouths;
I don't mind
that Stalingrad
& Gettysburg
& millions
of dead stumps
sticking in
the flushed earth
are fronts
for dick-waving
& flag fawning.
I don't even mind
that their walnuts
are patted with powders
as they suckle
from enormous breasts
through endless nights.

No, I don't mind.

What I do mind
is that neither one
of those motherfuckers
have started
a poetry magazine.
I, too, have
priorities.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THE DANGER ZONE

http://bit.ly/2a5CTRk

His blues still shouts blind
in this darkness we're in.
It's a piss-poor choice
to choose from and gleefully
lick our hands anyway.
Mussolini on the balcony
tossing bouquets of bombast
while the Wicked Witch tries
to sniff out infidelities
and infidels. Who could
blame her
for feeling entitled
after living with God's gift
to neurosis?
She can still hear
his honeyed voice
full of Hope
& bullshit say:
"Had a hard day,
need to shower."
And still she could smell
sex all over him.

Mussolini had Fred
& Roy Cohen to get him hard
& now he keeps his daughter
closer than his wife.
Something's up
with that
is something
he might say.
I'll just lie down
on the nearest couch
& wile away my days
waiting for the world
to whimper & sputter
& spill from the sounds
& the furies of
nothing.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THE ONLY THING THIS COUNTRY EVER BIRTHED

was the blues
and it was
a breeched birth at that.
"Kiss my ass,"
the crack
in the myth
announced
as they slid
& gripped
a lifetime
of pain
and song
hanging
from the
low limbs
of Poplar trees,
liquor laughter
& a sweet-milked tit
of secrecy.

Thank God Jews
ain't white.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

CALLING ALL BLACK FOLKS

You got a shot with Bernie.
In fact, more of a shot
than you had with Barry.
You got an old grandpa Jew
with a righteous pitchfork
up his ass; it's been touching
his heart
from the time he knew
it had a beat.
He needs you now
to keep breathing.

You all know
unless you get some serious
redistribution, you'll be dead
by the time another white man
comes along to help you
change a tire; get out of jail;
get a job, an education; a room
with a view.

FUCK THE ACADEMY AWARDS.

FUCK EASY DISTRACTIONS.

FUCK ENTERTAINMENT.

It begins
and ends
in this country
with money.
And any black person knows:
if you don't get your money straight,
you're a fool.

Calling Ta-Nahisi, calling Spike,
calling John Lewis & Ramsey Lewis
(& Sinclair Lewis), calling Denzel,
and Michael and Magic and Toni
and Oprah and any and all Negro
Negra Black colored oreo mulatto
Spic & Span Latino Hispanic Mexican
who knows how to rub
two nickels together
to get on board for this guy
and stop bullshitting
about what you don't have.
If you let that fake ofay
sax player and his trifling wife
have their day
your day
is yesterday
and yesterday
is nowhere.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

A THANKSGIVING FOR MONGRELS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGb5IweiYG8

A genius in the blood
both vile and rabid,
bit the country's
flesh and inflicted
a pure poison that runs
through arteries and veins
pulsating coast to coast.

The car is driven
by hunger. Beauty
is in marriage,
alchemy is fertile
& febrile &
forbidding.

It's Peggy Lee
aching. While
Captain Smith
& Pocahontas nutty
as kittens,
discover other,
more sacred lands
to explore.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

TONIGHT I HUNT

turkeys. A month
from now, reindeer
& clowns
in red suits.
It's come to that.
I believe
in America &
the American way:
you eat
what you kill--
first you
then me--
and always make time
for commercials.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE ANNUAL PILGRIMAGE: MOVE-IN DAY AT NYU--FROM THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE--CHAPTER 18

The city doesn’t empty out in August as much as it just falls flat and crawls at thirty three and third. Everything sweats: arms and arms of chairs, sides of beds, remote controls, shot glasses…a sparrow’s dick. It winnows the earth’s savagery down to its basics: first breaths.

Except for move-in day at NYU…

I’d been a student of this particular migration for nearly fifty years: going from nest to nest, leaving the parental roost, and swinging, usually without missing a beat, into the arms of a different breeding ground; a bit intimidating, but not rough—this was New York City in the twenty-first century, not the fucking savannah. Like most everything now, there was just too much money at stake for everybody who stood to make a buck and those spending a buck for the exchange to be fraught with too many external risks. Life is an illusion, of course, and this was a petri dish of urban illusion; control was king in this fiefdom. Shit, they even put up a fucking awning over nearly the entire block where the NYU dorm was in case it threatened to rain. I’d not seen a kid in thirty years walk with a suitcase in hand, alone, trying on his new clothes without benefit of his mother’s hand or his father’s eyes.

The city in their munificence allowed NYU to block off the streets surrounding the two dorms near me for days; little NYU elves stood at the crossroads directing the Esplanades, Navigators, SUV’s, Mercedes, Lexus and Caddy’s, and less dignified modern chariots into spaces near the confines of those Spartan dorm rooms and twenty-four hour a day security.

I’d been living around the corner from these warehouses for our future leaders since Grant was a cadet, and liked to fuck with them as they were breaking through the parental yolk. I was doing them a service: ushering them into their last phase of exemption before they, too, hustled their way toward the boneyard.

This annual pilgrimage had me going from my pad to a brownstone with a stoop that offered some shade from the merciless sun, heat and humidity that refused to abate. I took with me an old and worn copy of a nineteen-sixties tits and ass magazine. On the cover was a sexy coed using her books as her only bodily armor with the caption proclaiming: CAMPUS CUTIES: WHERE TO FIND THE BEST COLLEGE SNATCH. I opened the rag randomly, spread the pages wide, and took up watch.

Out they tumbled. Trucks opened and hatchbacks raised. Mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers, all looked around at this strange new world, this concrete enclave which really only offered them its greatest and most fearful gift: anonymity.

They looked like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Their heads swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees before they moved to unload their loved ones loot to create a home away from home. Boxes and plastic buckets filled to the brim with every imaginable substitute for the “blue or pink blankie” now morphed into “favorite” undershirt, underwear, jockey, boxer, pantie or thong: fushia, aqua, pink, white, blue, black, yellow or crimson. All stainless and smelling as sweet as a baby’s scalp. Nothing had turned to shit yet. All the notebooks were white and clean. Waiting for their hand to write a sentence, even a word. Classes had not been cut or failed. Romances had yet to bloom or fade. Everything, (my god!), was still possible.

The boys were a bit more sullen and the girls more jiggly. Girls knew early on that their cunts were part of nature, while the boys were still trying to figure out how their dicks were attached and what made them work. Each were pregnant with expectation…and so were their parents.

Particularly suspicious were parents of Middle East descent, followed closely by the Asians. They knew that they might have owned a few square feet of The American Dream, but little else. They’d busted their balls for their darlings, breathing in cleaning fluid or shelling peas while watching their crazed and hair-trigger customers run in and out. They watched with disgust as their culture was being digested into a McDonald’s maw.

The mothers usually brought up the rear, while the fathers pretended to lead the way into the unknown. The white families, a bit more on terra firma, still were in unknown parts of their own particular fears. Sweat was running off them as they piled the computers, T.V’s, hot plates, microwaves, tiny iceboxes, and other electric gadgetry onto carts that other NYU elves so eagerly provided. The kids, however, controlled their cells, iPhones, iPods, Blackberrys, secreted diaphragms, hidden condoms, a stashed pack of smokes, a little reefer maybe, and a few pills for later.

Some parents glanced my way. They saw an old, rumpled, man, smoking a cigarette, laid back, holding a girlie magazine, only his eyes peering over the top lip at the flesh of their flesh. Most looked away quickly; some looked too long.

I saw the bare arms and legs and faces of the twateenis, so smooth, creaseless, unlined. Charlie Chaplin and Julio Romero de Torres would go nuts. Some of them, the high school adventurers, were skilled already in knowing the knowing look of looks. And some boys, curious already about the ways of some men, glanced at me, too. They were the deeper ones, going further than their peers into their own studies and the outreaches of their limited and limiting birthdate. And as each sexy and sex-starved eye caught mine, their parent’s radar unconsciously swiveled their once upon a time sex-starved eyes to the stoop where I sat. The white eyes of fathers unknowingly dismissed me, the Asian ones deferred to the wives, and the Indians didn’t know what the fuck to express. The moms, though, didn’t hide their disdain…and claws. Some of them moved their bodies between my sight and their kids bodies and pushed them onward to the tasks at hand, keeping their feeble bodies and best of intentions between desire and action. It was a battle most them would, if they hadn’t already, lose.

The only remaining trump card that the parents really had was plastic, but it was a pyrrhic victory at best. It would only cost them more money, but would cost me more time and I had precious little of that left to lose. I’d stand behind them for the next four years while they paid for the smallest most inconsequential purchase—a container of milk, a cup of coffee, a pack of Orbit—while I’d shift from foot to foot, getting older, more frustrated and angry, waiting for the transaction to go through. Their bar and marijuana tabs would be handled with cash.

pgs 102-104 of 539--The Departure Lounge
© 2015 Norman Savage

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE CHINESE

have been reading
my poetry
of late.
Lots of them.

And I've been eating
their food,
it seems,
all my life;
first Jewish Chinese:
eggrolls, spare ribs,
Chow Mein,
Chop Suey,
mustard, soy,
and duck sauce.
Only later
did I discover
Chinese food
when I lived
with a Chinese woman.
Thank God.

We've been getting fat
on each other's by-products,
(I hope),
then
& now.
It's the definition
of free-
trade.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

LI NA & DENNIS

I saw
Li Na
& Dennis
on TV
the other night;
she's beautiful,
and tough,
and terribly
skilled.
He's heavy,
not very handsome,
but seems wise
beyond his years.
They both
have been
through love's
fires
and have come
out
the other side.

It made
this white Western man
very very
jealous.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

STAR SPANGLED BANNER UNFURLED

"Ladies & Gentlemen,
will you please rise
while we celebrate
our nation's colors.
Singing our National Anthem
are Charlie Patton, Sun House,
Robert
Johnson, Sonny Boy
Williamson, John Lee
Hooker & Elmore
James--all in, showered,
& cleaned-up from a hot day
in the fields, and members
of the Parchment Farm
Boys Choir; givem
a nice warm round
of applause.

(Those wanting to go
to the bathroom,
this
would be a good time
to do so...
And remember:
tipping,
while encouraged,
is optional)."

Batter-up.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

ONE FOR THE DEAD...AND SOON TO BE DEAD

The 9/11 World Trade Center
theme park
opened
for business
last week.
Thrills, chills
and death-defying skills
wrapped in our collective hearts
are there
for all
to frolic in
for 24 bucks a pop:
Disney does death.

You too can experience
a busted-up fire truck,
bicycles driven by ash,
a million shades of blue,
a wall full of faces
lonely for a date,
a Y beam, and X beam,
a sun beam,
you can meditate,
concentrate,
integrate,
facilitate,
vacillate,
prognosticate,
and, yes,
masturbate
to visions
of your own
choosing
providing,
of course,
the choice
was chosen
by holocaust
survivors.

On separate screens
you can experience
the adrenaline rush
of school kids
being hunted down
and shot,
veterans
lined up for years
waiting
for an aspirin,
or sleeping under
a freeway
near you--google maps
will do this for free.

Finally,
before you take the kids home,
to that fattened blob of a town
in one of America's sturdy out lands
clutching a 32 ounce soda,
you can simulate a fall
from the 104 floor
through make believe smoke
and make believe fire
& flames,
grasping for arms,
or fingers,
or hair,
through the air,
lungs collapsing,
eyes going blind,
& splatter
into a stain
on the sidewalk below
as a camera snaps
and a picture
of nothing
is produced
that you carry back
to the other fat-calved
football fans
somewhere else.

The gift shop
is to your right.
Step lively.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014