I'VE BEEN ON A TRANE RUN

For sensual junkies of all stripes...

for about a week now.
Things like this seem to happen to me--
have a taste of Haagan Dazs tonight
& a week later my mug is still buried
in a gallon; read a Bukowski poem
& a month later you can find me
nailed & waving to him
from the next cross.
From birth
I've been a heat-seeking guided missle
of pleasure; tickle a part of my brain
& I climb aboard
without thinking
of schedule or
destination. Let the driver
or conductor worry
about that. Besides,
I reason, they're getting paid
to get me where I'm going; I'm
just along for the ride.

Sure,
sometimes the trip
has been bumpy--
unscheduled stops
for hospitals
& rehabs, a love affair
or two that had me
missing my stop or
missing an organ,
but how are you going to tell a cannibal
that the flesh he's hungered for
might be necrotic?
He'll just laugh
& eat around the edges.

Sixty-one years ago
some tasty black spoonfuls
conjured a be-bop magic
in the alchemy of a white chef's
basement in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Today, April 12, 2019,
I'm feasting
on their labors
of love.
The Trane
endures & tastes
wonderful.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

For all junkies of the senses...

CHRISTMAS EVE, 1954

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHKnvwoGg0Y

Five niggers
gathered
to play
nigger music
in a non-nigger house
in New Jersey.
They were cool
with that.
The rest of the world
was still white:
Brown Vs. Board
was a colored victory;
Jackie & Willie
were great colored ballplayers,
a credit to their race,
but were harbingers
(and still "colored.")
Cigarettes were twenty-five cents a pack.
A drink a buck.
Cap of heroin was fifty cents.
Brown band leaders
sick from a night
of no pay
& bad food
in a cheap
Chinese fish shack,
leaned into blondes
with bad skin.
Crew-cuts & skinny ties
told the tale
of a country heated
by recent wealth
and power. Ike smiled.
Yet underneath
the green golf carpet
mischief brewed.

In this Van Gelder home
St. Nick
had to,
if he had a mind,
jimmy his way in;
crazy voodoo artists,
brought their own gift,
were at work
while their drunken painter friends
lapped at the bowls in the bowels
of The Cedar Bar & San Remo's.

Percy plucked & walked rhythm's spine;
Cluck brushed a high hat;
Miles, precise & dark, played with blackness;
Bags danced;
and Monk, beautifully unhinged, splashed color through his fingers.

These times
are terribly light.
And still white.
Crazy art
is bought & paid for
before it can do anything
like breathe.

I was seven then,
almost seventy now.
I celebrate the birth
of something.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015