DOPE THAT'S BEEN STEPPED ON, AND STEPPED ON...

Let those silly romantics yearn
for days long ago
when beds held a virginal bliss
of a love yet to be unspooled
and unspoiled
by our all too human delusion
of a life in its earliest embryo
of innocence & safety.

America, too, the idea of,
has been cut, stepped on,
so many times,
you barely feel it, now,
except to feel cheated.
Once, pure, perhaps,
in the tents of chiefs
and those with lust
in their hearts
for adventure
carved trails over mountains
rock-ribbed from shore
to praire to shore
carrying banjos singing
with disbelief
and daring--
now reduced to a mathematics
naked of forests & rivers,
indulging earth's moods
whether scorched or flooded,
holding aces & eights
inside capillaries of sin,
tricked-out on Saturday nights
fucking any floppy breasted
sacrificial whore in sight.

Instead I'll choose to remember
going uptown to discover
dope so good
it was sold in fat
deuces & tray bags,
cut so honest
it bordered on religion
allowing me
to come down
from the cross
and up to sit in God's palm
amidst his opium breath
and golden spun dreams.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

A THANKSGIVING FOR MONGRELS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGb5IweiYG8

A genius in the blood
both vile and rabid,
bit the country's
flesh and inflicted
a pure poison that runs
through arteries and veins
pulsating coast to coast.

The car is driven
by hunger. Beauty
is in marriage,
alchemy is fertile
& febrile &
forbidding.

It's Peggy Lee
aching. While
Captain Smith
& Pocahontas nutty
as kittens,
discover other,
more sacred lands
to explore.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

FORENSIC ANTHROPOLGY

Found
under reams
& scraps
of paper
curling
at the edges,
yellowed,
and torn
haphazardly
and done over
centuries
from something
larger, perhaps
monstrous.
With much pain
I pieced it
together:
a poem:

WHA
T
Y
OU
D
O
to me
is some
thing
I can't
ex
plain--
so I
won't .
I only
know
how
my body
sings
&
how eac h
note settles
in tge
flesh.
You've gotten away with crimes of the heart.
You've taken my love without telling me
how.

Not bad,
I said,
to myself; almost
human.
Maybe
I could trace it
back
to a time
before
cruelty.
I will
put it
up
and study it
under
the light.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015