WHERE DO YOU GO WHEN YOU GO WHEN YOU KNOW YOU HAVE NO PLACE TO GO

Those times when you know
you have to go but
do not know exactly
why you have to go
but go you have to
and go you will.


Those times when I become
a turtle drawing my legs
and neck into my space,
into a heroin enclave,
an armored shell & soft belly,
permitting the least amount of damage done
to an already compromised immune system.

Where do you go to breathe.
Where can you undress
down to the confines of your heart
and not be disgusted by its beat.
When will all those monstrous mirrors
tell the truth.
Where do you go when you go
to those unnamed & untamed regions
you know so well;
how naturally do you play
in Keat's sandbox
of negativity?

As for me
I go where safety waits,
though truth is fear's
first casualty.
Still, I would think,
(maybe hope),
it's a stone's throw
from yours;
close enough
for us to share
a shovel.
We cannot, alone,
dig a tunnel out,
but we sure as hell
can get closer
to one another
just by breathing.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

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

ON BEING AN OLD MAN (TENTATIVELY)

My child is dead
but, as yet,
he does not know it.
Alive,
he is projected across
the naked screen where
a magic lantern threw off
forms that knew not the boundaries
of flesh. It's my own lie
that prevents the occurance
and not without reason.
But that's my problem.

It should be the child,
not the gender,
that's important;
yet I can't help wanting the strong
Spartan male who's as old as Greece
and as young as a first reading is.
I find that hard to live with,
though not impossible.

My life is spent staring
into Times Square neon
and then,
once sufficiently blinded,
I try the Port Authority
to catch the next bus out;
it's silly
to try and do something like that.
I've not found
a comfortably narrow street
to walk down; either my shoes
scrape against the red protruding brick,
or the street opens
too quickly
giving way to the broadest of intersections.
There is only the misleading map
of intuition to assist,
only today,
with the huge hidden asterisk that says:
use once,
then,
throw away.

It is not so hard
to understand
beauty;
despite the urn
it doesn't exist
except
as contradiction.

I cannot make love
without seeing the other side.
My inability is with women.
Sparta is not that far.

Norman Savage
Coney Island, 1968