MUSING ON THE BONES

of those who went
before me
to discover what
they make of these,
our uncertain times
finds me sniffing
around on ground
more suitable for balm
than banalities.
For all I know Socrates
would more lament
not getting a handjob
than gathering in the town square
to discuss death; Bird
would worry more
about his uptown connection
than playing at a filled Onyx Club;
Al Capone & Billy the Kid
had bigger problems
than hand sanitizers;
& Shakespeare would spend days
hung-up trying to rhyme coronavirus.

Those microscopic worms of malice
do not get fat on history; neither
do they care about sin
or saintliness. They enjoy
all our fares that still has a pulse.
They even lack the judgement
of the crematoriums which belched
Jewish ash into the faces of angels;
or the Poplar trees
where black bodies blew, to & fro,
in the malignant south.

No, I must search
closer to home
to uncover the stench
circling around the bare bulb
of etiology: ma & pa.
If anyone knows
how this migrant, unwanted,
unloved, repulsive visitor
vomited itself across
our country's magical mosaic
it would be them:
"It's your fault," they would say
in unison. "Somehow, someway,
you brought it on yourself...
& deserve to suffer now...And
you can take that to the bank--
if you can find one that's open."

And that, as they say,
is that.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

A HIATUS

For B.L. mainly

I'm going to try and take a little break from posting in order to finish the novel I'm working on. I'm close, but need to take the energy I use for this, and put it into that. And while it's true that the poem and the novel are one, still, I find that working on one can water down the other. I would think that three to six months sounds about right.

I'm going to leave you with a quote by a friend, Jamieson, and her husband, Simon.

"To love is to give what one does not have and to receive that over which one has no power. To love is to freely negate the stubbornness that is the self and to live in loyalty to an affirmation that can dissolve like morning mist with the first experience of betrayal."
--Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster--
"Stay, Illusion"

FORTY-DEUCE

Striptease night,
laughing
at the days blatency,
curls
inside dampness
as cosmetic whores
frown
upsidedown
in neon
madness.

Norman Savage
New York City, 1973

POEM

sizzling sun
fever at noon
as the outlaw rides
into the spoon.

his escape spilled
from the spiders lips
and he, only able to kiss
the ghost of a spirit, choose
to be, Hamlet,
once again.

Norman Savage
New York City, 1973