A DISMAL END TO AN ASHEN YEAR, 2015

This town has no juice.
There isn't a buzz, not
a hum; it's leaden like
death. A pallor of gray
ash. Broadway is dim;
a yellow wattage darkens
the streets. Children
are dragged into toy stores.
The Salvation Army plays
Wagner on their bells.

Perhaps, it's Paris
or San Bernardino,
Chicago or The West
Bank or The Congress
or The President
who looks like
he hasn't gotten pussy
in years; tired
from the prom
from the promise
from what is
not? Perhaps,
it's constantly looking
for sales and bargains
because there are no
sales or bargains--
everything costs more
than what they're worth?
A collective reckoning.
A hundred and forty characters...
and you're dead.
An attention span of fleas.

I've gotten emails,
but no Christmas cards;
I've sent out emails,
but haven't licked a stamp.
It is company without flesh;
sentiment without breath.

I'm sure many people feel differently.
There will be champagne flutes aplenty
aloft in The Hamptons & Fifth Avenue
& Sutton Place come the thirty-first.
Some men will suckle an enormous breast
while thousands more are jailed
like a household pet through endless nights.
Those are not the ones I mean.
It's the fat middle that keeps getting fatter
that feasts on the offal that spins
off the techno butcher house of synthetics
that pawns itself off as real meat
that plays with me.
More people
have less;
more people
have less;
more people
have less;
and less people
have more
and more
and more.
"Will the machine gunners
please step forward."

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

ONE HELL OF A YEAR

Plenty of beauty
and plenty of blood.
Both were given
and granted
without
permission.
The body
sometimes moves
without knowing
why.
Such
is life; such
is the task
and the terror
lived
on a border
of disorder.
It's jazz
and jism;
it sticks
to the air;
it's in
your underwear.

I loved the beauty
and needed to be bled.
My alienist helped
cure me
by all this
exposure.
I can't say
it helped; I can say
it worked.

I began last year
in the arms of a love
and will begin this year
in the arms
of another.

(Inside
that and this
parenthesis
was only
misery
with small pockets
of pleasure).

There is
in all this
some kind
of balance.
I know
not
what
this
balance
is. But
I've seen it
through.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014