CUIDADO! BRO,

were sung scared
like sparrow chirps
and hung in the air
and strung across
tenement houses
and abandoned buildings throughout
the lower east side
like clothes-lines
from the time I began copping dope
in the nineteen sixties
to the time I finished
in the early two thousands.
"Beware" brother
was sung by pimply-faced adolescents
who were stationed like city-sentries
near the spots that sold "D&C"--
dope and coke
--in nickel and dime bags
in outdoor supermarkets
or hollowed out buildings
24/7.
They knew when the cops
were about to roll-up on you
for big busts; and they knew
when the plainclothes would sneak
into your ass; and they made sure
you would have time to scurry
into the next hole and,
more importantly, their bosses
to get their ass
and their product out
and gone.
"Cuidado! bro,"
and everybody stopped.
Motionless.
Our bird heads
and our bird brains
attuned for the kind of danger
being caught
courted.
Yes, it was nothing less
than "cops and robbers,"
but it was love, too.
We were renegades
living behind
a renegade mask.
The volume pumped
up as the flesh
heated over the Bunsen burner city
melting us on sidewalks, in cars,
on rooftops, in beds in hospitals
and jail cells, in this dance
of death.

I've just finished
another dance.
This one
far more dangerous: love
between humans dripping
with neurosis.
It was a complicated
dance. In this
I wanted
to get caught; I wanted
to be exposed; I would have gladly
served time.
In the year
this dance lasted
I heard the word, "Cuidado,"
often enough,
in a sigh or
in a wail,
but each admonition
in my own voice hard
to discern and so
easily swallowed
and stilled.

Things have changed out there:
outdoor drug supermarkets
are gone; abandoned buildings
have been turned to upscale condos;
white drug addicts have delivery services.
They've even tried to sanitize "love."
Handjobs aren't love; blow jobs aren't love;
eating pussy isn't love; monogamy is
optional. "Shell shock" is "battle fatigue"
is PTSD. Give it a different word or phrase
and you put distance between you and the world.
It becomes less
and less real.
Nah, I pass.
I'd rather have the down and dirty,
the rough and tumble, the blood,
the grit, the dirt that's supposed
to clog the veins, gum-up the machinery,
make you unable to get out of bed
the next morning.
I would like a woman
to whisper, "Cuidado"
in my ear
forever.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

"YOU'RE SURROUNDED:

For Jimmy Cagney & Tom Signorelli

Come out
with your hands up."

"Fuck you.
I ain't comin out.
Come get me."

(And they will,
yes, they will.)

Everything constricts;
you're inside the Boa.
You swallow
and feel the fish
bones stuck
in your gullet.
There are no good memories.
Even when you thought
you were so smart,
so slick,
so much
the rogue
with girls and women
and the art
of persuasion
it now chokes you
with imbecility.
All the breasts
you've nuzzled,
all the legs
thrown over
your shoulders,
all the laughs
and ease after
the spring's sparks
had settled refuse
to reverberate.

It is a bill
you've run out on
they've come to collect;
a prerequisite
you've never taken
out of fear,
out of spite,
mockingly stares back
like Nietzsche's abyss.
All the "time" you've thought
you've killed
comes back
to avenge its murder.

We hole up
beside our barbed-wire
selves. Blue smoke
settles over corpses
plucked bare; our bones
will be bleached
by the hands of lovers
and laid bare and sold
like Indian artifacts.
You can't turn around
without getting cut.
Yet,
coming out
is not an option.
There still is a sliver
of light and the sound
of mice dancing a jig
underneath the floorboards.
And that's enough.
It has always been enough;
Enough for then
and enough for now.

Check your bullets,
steady your hand,
and take
aim.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013