YES MOMMY, OF COURSE, DADDY

always followed
by the silent
Fuck You
writ large
or small
once the lights
dimmed, the doors
closed, the mice
scurry and shadows
leave behind fears
like droppings
and your demons
romp.
Get out
the knife,
cut along
the perforation;
invert
the spike,
jiggle the vein,
ride the white horse,
purge the loving dinner,
slip your panties
off those frozen ankles.

How good
being bad
feels.

The gasoline
smells so good
each time
I fill the tank.
Almost as good
as the mimeograph
machine smelled
as I printed copies
of "Ode On A Grecian Urn"
for Miss Edelman's class
on a hot and pregnant day
sixty years ago
tomorrow imagining
my fingers fingering
her breast, my mouth
in her ear,
the ink still wet,
the pages moist,
I wept from excitement.

I sat next to
an old colored woman
on the crosstown bus.
She'd sowed a mean leopard print
onto her denim shirt
and had a leopard hat on her Sunday morning perm,
red nails, buffed, and red lipstick sitting proud
on her lips, I inhaled her
renegade blues walking up and down the aisle.
A hard-headed lover, and head turner,
stubborn, opinionated,
twisted with abandon,
we knew what stop
to get off
and off
we got.

Mommy,
I said.
Yes, Daddy,
whatchowantsugar?
Your sweet self,
I replied,
Come and get it.
The demons stood back
and let me go get near.

It was only Wednesday;
and I'm off tomorrow.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

ANTICIPATING

harm,
confrontation
of some kind
constantly
afraid
of what lurks.
I don't know
what
but
I do know
it's there
coming
to get me...
and you,
too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

I KEEP

the door open
by not killing you
in the book--even
when you're ready
to die.
Everything about you
tells me to return
you to a state
of nothingness.
But, obviously,
I find that
too troubling
even for me.
I cannot stuff
and mount you
on my desk,
like the black
panther of prey
you are, nor
place you
in a convenient
sarcophagus
under my bed
embalmed by
your sexual
juices.
And I do
love you,
you see,
but your
usefulness
is done
in this
matter.
So now,
as your
death scene
approaches,
I delay
and make
all kinds
of excuses
not to show
you the door.

I'm getting it done
in inches,
I tell my brother,
Hamlet, never very good
at this kind of thing either.
Finish the goddamn thing
and get on with it; it won't
be published anyway, despite
what your agent says.
Still, a death
is a death
whether in life
or on the page,
especially when
it's love
that's dying.
You'd like a moment more
to co-mingle,
co-noodle,
co-miserate
with what you thought
it was before it became
what it was
originally.
The closer I get
the farther away
you become; I
can feel that
in my bones.
Doing this
was a way
of stopping
that and that
grows fainter, too.

Get on with it,
they tell me...
and I will.
The pain
is still
exquisite...and
there's
nothing else
to do.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE GHOSTS

in my fingers
summon her
animus;
I straddle
her grave.
I've killed her
enough
to mistake
the living
for the dead.

Who
but the loved
know
how many deaths
it takes
to make
a life
together?

Each shadow,
a poem.
Each poem
a shadow.
Let my loves,
the ones
wielding knives,
& machine guns,
cannons,
& bombs,
even words,
step forward--
I'm ready...
for the blindfold.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015