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