A DATE WITH THE EXECUTIONER

The Betty Poems

Two days
after Christmas
I'm going to die:
my baby's
coming in.
She'll wing her way
to me
on a prayer
and a cross.
I'll suffer,
I know,
for her sins
and mine.

She has little interest,
she told me,
in waiting
for Godot,
or any others;
she has no patience
for Tchaikovsky's
romanticism or
suffering; she has grown-up
inside her own skin
and that has been enough
for ten lifetimes.

We'll have a grand time,
she said,
pleasuring each other
with our humor
and our fingers
and our silence.
She wants
her wheels
to come off
for a few days
without thinking
about thinking,
without having to do
a goddamn thing.

It just seems right
when love is not more
or less
than what love is:
a prism
that reflects
your own colors
and colors
what you reflect.
And you become content
to allow that love
to kill you.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

SHE'S A FOOL

The Betty Poems

for cupcakes,
especially
the icing; she's weak
for coconut.
She favors
non-fiction,
the more morbid
the better:
concentration camps,
abject suffering,
alcoholism,
hopelessness.
But there must be
a tiny tiny light
of redemption.
One of her organs
is dead.
It died
when mine did
a decade earlier.
She fears nothing
except being second
to her lover's love.
She's fierce,
ferocious really
in her objections,
appetites,
desires
and refusal
to let go
of slights
and slippage.
When she smiles
her youth
is there
in all its vulnerability
and trust
despite herself; she
is always on guard
and fails
for good reason; pain
has always breathed with her,
beside her,
through her.
I've been fortunate
to witness fountains
of love
come out of her
secret places
I'll never know
and puddle
in the palms
of my hands.

Yet,
she's a motherfucker:
too smart,
too deep,
too complex
for me
to matter.

And that's
unfortunate--
for both of us.
Nothing to do
except
bury the bad
with the bones
and remember
everything else--
and that's enough.

It has to be.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013