WE TRADED KISSES

and rumors,
whispers of conspiracies,
suffused the concrete
against our backs
right-angled handball courts
in our schoolyard.
They were lit
by our backdrop, graffiti neon,
mouse eared, horses
made of iron charging
full throated & adamantine, a city
gun like rainbow jello,
weeping toward a jitterbug June.
Our t-shirts
still white, our arms
barely brown our hands
creaseless
careless yet tight
around fingers walking Spanish
inside each other
and the play of shadows.

We had time
for a cigarette
but only
if we shared it.
We saved our saliva
for our mouths
when they opened
to each other
& left the cigarette
perfectly dry.
Closer,
I said.
She laughed.
C'mon,
closer.
She draped one leg
across mine.
Closer.
Her mouth
& tongue
were in
my ear.
Nicotine
slid
down
my throat.

We had cut
our ninth period
in the ninth grade;
we were seniors,
we had
all the time
in the world.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

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