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

I USED TO HIDE

Ian Fleming
and Mickey Spillane
against the spine
of whatever text
they had us read from
in my high school classes.
I liked Fleming's sophistication
and Spillane's guts in their
Bond & Hammer personas.
You could call me bipolar now,
or just fucked-up then.
But however the marriage worked
it allowed me to cop uptown dope
and fuck downtown dowagers.

I like polarities
and extremities of weather;
I like black & blue blues
& Verdi Requiems.
It has never endeared me
to the family of girls,
who eyed me
with suspicion--justified,
I might add--
or the supervisors in all the jobs
I've had--which was the only thing
I earned. I've had little patience
with the days and had to sit still
over nights without end. I bitched
and complained and never apologized.

I still appreciate how Lawrence
can rip off a piece of ass
with class and those pulp dimes
who ejaculate before they unzip
themselves. Which way
do you prefer?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THERE WAS THIS GIRL

in high school
I lusted for.
It was not desire,
but need. But she
was tangled up
with a moron.
You can argue
against anything
except stupidity.

That next summer
things had changed:
her mom was fucking
a Communist neighbor
and she had abandoned Russian
for an Art major in college;
she knew what lies were
and how to create some
of her own; and I got smart
in the cosmology of drugs
and bullshit. She'd also quit
the moron and watched
how her body leaned in
to itself. Her eyes
were still cat's green.

We read Ramparts
& Ginsberg, sung Dylan
& Motown, smoked pot
& fucked whenever
& wherever we could
& survived some of the onslaught.
But not all of it;
she's dead forty-five years now
& I'm still going--not as strong
but still going. Our pain,
inviolate & absolute, created
a union having little to do
with love as we imagined love
to be, but each time I think of her
it's different--and that's
a real poem.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

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

HIGH SCHOOL SHIT

I don't remember the class,
nor the subject,
nor the teacher,
but I do remember the boredom.
I remember reading something...
a short story,
a poem,
a novel,
something
but I do remember the line:
"we are what we're least afraid to be."
It stopped me.
It resonated.
Echoed.
I read it a few times
and obviously
committed it to memory.
I was not a good student.
Easily bored,
distracted, ashamed
of my awkwardness
and inability to fit
anywhere.
I had a brashness
a bravado
to try and balance
the scales,
but I knew
deep down
just what a jerk-off
I was.
I knew I could not make it
in the straight world,
normality was not "my thing"
and so cultivated any
and everything that took me
outside it: gambling,
unprotected sex, brown paper bag
drinking, reefer, and finally
dope. I was a "traditionalist."
Drinking without ice, without
chasers; women with no particular
discernment; dope that needed
to be shot.
Somehow
I managed to survive:
good women, mostly.
And somehow
I grew-up
somewhat
and realized
just how true
that high school line
was and is.
There are those
hiding under a guise
of isolation,
more afraid to be loved
and less afraid to be rancid;
those who wonder
what those outside lines
mean and what it is
to cross them;
I am more afraid to live
and less afraid to write
about living; and those
who live with quiet urgency
and keep their desires
loud inside them.

I still have needs
that need to be met;
I need to be told
that surgeons
do not need scalpels
to make you well
and whole
again.
I am not abstract;
I am a straight line
that grew-up
crookedly; I've made
with a will,
not my own,
something
better, something
that loves me.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014