BECAUSE THERE IS SO MUCH BEAUTY

that only torture brings out,
I've made sure
to have stockpiled
enough pain annuities
to last a lifetime.
My memory bank
welcomes the lash
& the leash
of new subscribers,
but should I see
a masochistic downturn
I simply tune in
to my favorite stations
and taste the blood
of a finely aged betrayal.

Johnny Keats
waxing poetic
on a Grecian Urn
shook the Brooklyn
off its perch
and into the steely crabgrass
where the hanging-judge
and the lotus-eater
hold court.

To all those
who've hurt or crippled me,
I cannot thank you enough.
To all those
who've fooled or betrayed me,
my hat is off to you;
you have lived far past
your expiration date,
but torture me still.
You've birthed this poem
and those which came before
and those which come after.
It's a signless road,
but well-traveled.
I can find it in the dark.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Working with the addicted,
the deranged, the borderline,
the schizo affective, the bi-polar,
the recently released, incarcerated,
the twitchy, the nervous, the traumatized,
the treated mercilessly, the tortured,
the stigmatized, the one's whose first word
was no, whose innards boast the picket fences
of fear, too early and too complicated and too monstrous
to look through and too briar rich to get through without
bleeding to death is almost as hard
as loving them.

I should know:
For fifty years
I've made a living
off them & tonight
I'm taking one out
to dinner.

I myself
am one
& divide
against
myself
as tides
come in
& try
to drown
me.

There is something rousing
about jousting with impossibility;
something stirring
when the strings
are struck
in the hearts
of masochists.
Sometimes
they even summon things
of beauty.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

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