TOMMY

had a white '65
Chevy SuperSport
with 4 on the floor
& red leather buckets
we'd tool around in
when we were seniors
in Lincoln High School
outside Coney Island.
Even the hawk eyes
of my mother
couldn't see
when I passed the bend
of our block. I ducked
into Tommy's house
a few blocks away.
He was rich
& lived in a big home
directly on the beach.
His father, Horseshit Harry,
owned steamships. Tommy had
two younger sisters
& a knockout mother, Josaphina,
who knew she drove his friends wild,
wearing diaphonous negligees
as she descended from above.
If the light
caught her right
the hair on the back of my neck
would prickle.
There'd usually be two or three
more friends who showed, but I
was always the first.
Our routine was almost automatic:
we'd say goodbye to Josaphina,
who always knowsingly eyed us,
& tumble into his ride, me
riding shotgun and began
by cutting our first few classes
at The House of Pancakes
in Brooklyn, off The Belt Parkway.
I'd bum Marlboros off Tommy
(and he never gave me that tired bullshit
about when I was gonna begin buying my own),
while he drove. He always had one of his own
clentched between his front teeth
beneath a black mole
the size of a small pumpkin.
Usually, The Heart--born with a murmur
--& The Count--looked like Bela Lugosi
were in the backseat
puffing away.
We'd talk shit
about everyone we knew--
who was fucking who,
who wanted to fuck who,
who bullshitted about fucking who--
as we drove & smoked & ate pancakes
and counted the minutes
until Dukes, the poolroom,
or Surf Lanes, the alley,
would open & another decision
needed to be made:
school or no school?
It was the easiest vote
ever cast, & legislated
without dissent.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

HOLDING HANDS IN HIGH SCHOOL

After crossing
a canyon of fear
where small deaths
were lily pads
across the divide
& finding her fingers,
then hands, pulling me,
like liferopes of possibilities,
(and despite an erect & pulsating newness),
gave form & meaning to Curtis' Gypsy Woman.

Suddenly,
poetry made sense;
we were meant to be sung.
Old as we were being born
into a soiled & sordid world,
yet as unabashed as desire must be,
we read each other
in that mischevious look,
a smile worthy of Mona
and a leap into a trust
that defied your history
granting, finally, a childhood,
full of fancy & exploration
flushed with a kitten's curiousity
and a lion's hunger.

We bumped hips
making our way
from the stale
high school morning
into a new day
of frivolousness--
she in her jeans,
tight hot everything
and me in my coolness--
cutting those stupid classes
of dullness & dandruff,
trying to figure out
how I could be this lucky.

We had taken the chance to look
for that most elusive minute
in a corner of convenience--
whether in a four postered bed
overlooking the Atlantic,
or on a mildewed mattress
in an abandoned Coney Island tenement--
to discover each other
again and again and again
in an indifferent home
that was vacant that day
and welcomed our foolishness
and our courage
to enter.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

WE TRADED KISSES

and rumors,
whispers of conspiracies,
suffused the concrete
against our backs
right-angled handball courts
in our schoolyard.
They were lit
by our backdrop, graffiti neon,
mouse eared, horses
made of iron charging
full throated & adamantine, a city
gun like rainbow jello,
weeping toward a jitterbug June.
Our t-shirts
still white, our arms
barely brown our hands
creaseless
careless yet tight
around fingers walking Spanish
inside each other
and the play of shadows.

We had time
for a cigarette
but only
if we shared it.
We saved our saliva
for our mouths
when they opened
to each other
& left the cigarette
perfectly dry.
Closer,
I said.
She laughed.
C'mon,
closer.
She draped one leg
across mine.
Closer.
Her mouth
& tongue
were in
my ear.
Nicotine
slid
down
my throat.

We had cut
our ninth period
in the ninth grade;
we were seniors,
we had
all the time
in the world.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016