VODKA

Don'tcha love
potato farmers?
Tilt up
the glass
& taste
Fyodor's blood,
Mayakovsky's phlegm,
the drip
of Turgenev,
the mad laugh
of Gogol,
the fever & grace
of Baryshnikov,
Vygotsky's reach...
The liquid breath
is clean
anger
only clouded
by rants
of those possessed
by a holy negation;
too holy
to be written,
too sacred
for screed,
balancing a universe
drunk
on its axis
& lonely
for its
children.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

RUSSIAN ACTION

I seem to be
getting a lot of hits
on this blog
from old mother Russia.

I like that.

People of the earth;
people of history;
people who are nuts
in all the ways
I can understand:
literature nuts;
music nuts,
art nuts,
nut nuts.

My eighth grade english teacher,
Miss Edelman, my first crush
on an older woman, showed me
Dostoyevsky's C&P; Rasknolikov
dropped his ax
and cleaved my head
in two.
He was followed by Gogol,
& that old bedbug himself,
Mayakovsky. They're all
the soil's blood.

And I'd like to think
I am, too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015