I'VE NEVER BEEN VISITED BY THE DEAD

Maybe
they've been busy,
I've reasoned,
lighting the runways
for those
about to take off,
or land?
We all have our jobs
to do--like writing
this poem
in the dark.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

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

GETTING ANOTHER SHOT AT IT

Yesterday I had my fingerprints taken.
Human Resources will call me
sometime after the first
to give me a start date.
I don't know why
the gods have been so good to me:
jobs, women &, at times
Tennessee's strangers.
Most jobs & women I fucked up
while some fucked me up; why
the brass ring has come round
again--I don't know.

In fact, "why?" anything
I don't know.

But come January
I'll be going
to the Bronx
where I've only been
a few times before:
the old stadium
when the NY Giants
played in NY
& The Yanks
who built it;
the other times
I snuck in & out
to some south Bronx shit hole
to cop heroin when Fox
& Simpson Streets where known
as Ft. Apache.

I'll try to do
what I've done well before:
help some poor sonofabitch
and their family cope
with a bad hand
they were dealt
way before they knew
they were even in
a poker game.
I feel good
about that.
I think I can
do it
without trampling
on their ego
or succumbing
to my own.
Humility happened
grudgingly: my life
got ugly. No longer
was I a catch;
I was the caught.

But I got lucky:
some went to bat
for me. I owe it
to them to get up
to the plate
& not try
to hit it
out of the park,
but only try
to make
contact.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015