I SOUND LIKE AHAB

walking the deck
of The Pequod.
I thump
up & down
the empty stairs
of my brownstone
with my cane
sounding my own
particular madness
raging at God's
insensitive deafness
& my brown & drying
departed youth;
a body
in the midst
of rebellion
& decay.

I will give any man
this enigmatic gold doubloon if,
with this harpoon,
forged by a devil's fire,
to find for me
a memory
that doesn't speak
in simple sentences,
but rhapsodizes in soliloquies
righteous of prosaic complications--
going one step
to the next,
going out
& coming home
& warming myself
by the word furnace
of make believe
so elementary
& so endless.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

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

THE BEST WE CAN DO

when the words fail--
as they must
--when actions
are misinterpreted--
as they will be;
when the self's estrangement
and isolation
from the self
becomes your most familiar
acknowledgement,
we will leap
upon the other
with abandonment.
Each soul
grows hungry
with exaggeration
of their wholeness.
And each holy utterance
in the darkness
shearing the spirit
in two
is really silence
in the ears
of a deaf
God.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014