MY BROTHER

is sick.
His life
is littered
with addiction
like a NYC subway
is blanketed with disease.
My family tree
has syringes
hanging off the branches.
And each branch
has fucked each other
royally: absence, suffocation,
adultery, lies, betrayals, coke,
weed, booze, pills, and
that grandmaster,
heroin. Arms shot,
noses gone, lungs coal mined,
jobs destroyed, homes foreclosed,
cars repossessed, heirlooms pawned.
Few
have made it out
at any age,
but I did.
I got lucky.
After 50 years
of trying to fill
an inside straight,
I changed the game.
I found fear,
healthy fear.
I did not want
to die. Not
at 52, not
like this;
not then;
not now
at 68.

My brother
is stuck
in an addict's nightmare:
too easy to cop,
too hard to refuse.
His brain
is turning
to mush.
But after four years
I've persuaded him
to go into a program.
In all probability
it won't work,
but there's a shot
it will. If you're willing
to change the hand
& gamble in a game
where you don't know
the rules you might
get lucky
too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THE NIGHTMARE RIDES THE RAILS

The sunset is cold.
Evenings are cruel
reminders of mercies
once tendered by stick-up men
now behind the cage
mortgaged by age & small print.

I carry my limbs
like remembrances,
thick logs held as offerings
to burn in my night's furnace.
This is not penance.
This is an old Wurlitzer
in a 42nd Street dive.
This is speed rack Scotch.

She spread herself.
And I did the same.

I'm attracted
to the way poppies ooze.
How, when they're sliced
the jism slides
down their face.
It was a wise culture
who saw their mouths
around the bulbs easing
the cuts of a failing
light.

How women know
how to touch
the way they do
sits at the crossroads
of silence
& mercy.
Adam's curse,
revisited
nightly, plays
across her lips.
Her tongue licks
a wound deeper
than the world.

I would wake,
if I could,
to a life
like mine.
I would shake
my oily fur,
matted & soiled
from a mongrel's
impetuousness,
& find
my ear
in your
mouth
& your whispers
on my breath.

Let me love you,
it said,
and I awoke
looking
for the voice
& a gun.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015