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

I COME BEARING GIFTS

I bring you all my shit
and put it in your hands:
a hundred years of shards,
a library full
of tears, laughter
the wind catches
on its breath; these
are pedestrian
I know, but they're
just the foot soldiers.
Here's Johnny Too Bad
by Taj,By the Rivers
of Babylon, by Jimmy C;
Crime & Punishment,
which we've cultivated,
& The Ivy Crown,
which we haven't.
Miles
of music subversive,
and as dangerous
as Botticelli's gold
fuck rays streaming
to the virgin's womb;
vagabond's ramblings
& scrambled eggs
in forsaken diners,
thick slabs of bacon,
coffee hot enough
to know your tongue's there.
I give you old smelly corpses
of uselessness; dreams
brokered by cruelty; a city
of maybes...

My Medea,
I come to you knowing
I must be killed...
but not yet,
baby.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

VODKA

Don'tcha love
potato farmers?
Tilt up
the glass
& taste
Fyodor's blood,
Mayakovsky's phlegm,
the drip
of Turgenev,
the mad laugh
of Gogol,
the fever & grace
of Baryshnikov,
Vygotsky's reach...
The liquid breath
is clean
anger
only clouded
by rants
of those possessed
by a holy negation;
too holy
to be written,
too sacred
for screed,
balancing a universe
drunk
on its axis
& lonely
for its
children.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

RUSSIAN ACTION

I seem to be
getting a lot of hits
on this blog
from old mother Russia.

I like that.

People of the earth;
people of history;
people who are nuts
in all the ways
I can understand:
literature nuts;
music nuts,
art nuts,
nut nuts.

My eighth grade english teacher,
Miss Edelman, my first crush
on an older woman, showed me
Dostoyevsky's C&P; Rasknolikov
dropped his ax
and cleaved my head
in two.
He was followed by Gogol,
& that old bedbug himself,
Mayakovsky. They're all
the soil's blood.

And I'd like to think
I am, too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

HOT WALKING THROUGH A BONEYARD--FROM: THE DEPARTURE LOUNGE--CHAPTER 18

I’m gonna survive, I said to myself, as I breezed through The Cedar’s door and made my way west down eleventh street. All the shit that had piled up like egg crates holding newly laid eggs, had Crazy Glued themselves to each other.

I felt so good that I decided, even in this hot house, to trip down my own particular minefield of memory, a Spiritus Mundi of pleasures and pain, hoping to find one orchid to inch closer to before her sickly sweet sense of mortality overwhelmed me.

I still marveled at the bodies who passed me on the steaming slabs of concrete, walking to and fro, that way and this, with apparent direction. Do they all really have a destination? Do they have a place to go to…somebody that expects them…somebody they’re expectant to see…do they have a couch or a widescreen TV…do they know what they’re gonna do once they get there…do they give a shit about any of this…all of this…do they feel their second hand sweep around the circle?

I felt so good…that I forgot my legs were fucked; a half block down the pain reminded me and prevented the taking of another step. The four stents in my legs would have been better off setting-up a lemonade stand for all the good they were doing me. Diabetes ain’t gonna do me in, I thought, it’s going to be a gradual eroding, a nibbling away and clogging up, of every other component of my body. I stopped and waited for my pump to pump some oil around and through my engine.

Still, the fish tank windows of The New School looked down at the little triangle of bodies buried in the Jewish Portuguese piece of real estate. I was enclosed in one of those tanks when The Weathermen blew-up a brownstone next to Hoffman’s pad and fractured an afternoon of learning. A block away was the consumptive cough of Dylan T, the dreams of Delmore, and pieces of my fractured ribs and the barbecued ribs of Charlie Mom’s. I’d waited in front of St. Vincent’s for hours with my ex who wanted to give blood to bodies already incinerated from Muslim vibrations, and waited inside while they fitted me for a cast after a street fight with a Bowery bum. My underwear felt like the claw of a wet monkey was pulling on it.

Cars seemed fagged; people’s eyes looked scorched and blistered; drag queens, their powder running into their mouths licked it up with tongues aching from too many cigarettes and a last line of speed, were walking as if it were the night after the ball and nobody wanted to take them home. New York had little tragedies by the block: New York’s prehistoric underground grid was a degree away of giving up and browning out…air-conditioners wheezed from windows, barricading the old and infirm in a kind of cool nightmare that held them hostage knowing there was no one to pony-up the ransom. For them there was no waking.

But I was whistling a happy tune as I turned toward the Hudson. For whatever reason, Rick’s, or god, or Stevie Wynn decided not to call in my markers. Maybe they knew that my tragedies, big or small, had the gift of drama, too.

Rosie whacked me off while I finger-fucked her crazy during Night Of the Living Dead at The Greenwich, a cozy theater well-worn in the sixties, complete with torn velvet covered seats and matrons who held flashlights and fingers to their lips, and now a glass module sporting those athletic souls who love to work-out in windows; a stoop around the corner was the only solid thing I felt after smoking the best Panamanian Red I’d ever had in sixty-seven, levitating my body and taking my mind with it; a brunch poetry reading for Max at The Vanguard attended by me and Bruno the poets and Max and little more; chick peas, steak, lobster at Max’s Kansas City hunkering down in a front room round table seating The Chelsea Flying Academy—all those who’d suicided out the windows of The Chelsea Hotel, while the runway in the back held The Velvets and future aviators while some young girl underneath and among the press of legs, moving counter-clockwise, giving blowjobs to anything with a dick.

Memories, as delicate as they are, jutted in front of the inner eye full of lies and deceit and protein, without conjuring, and adhered like a cougher’s phlegm, to an old highway's mile posts. They were all beautiful because everyone is beautiful and everything is beautiful a day ago. Ugly, too. Disgusting…maybe…disfigured…perhaps…reptilian…certainly…but a way home.

But I wasn’t home; those of a semitic tribe are never, can’t be, home. The blues clings to us like sunrise sadness in a whorehouse. Afro blue, Jew blue, blue blues. I’ve been lookin for a Venus Paradise Coloring Set all my life and the only thing I’ve found is “maybe’s” that “take time.”

The Corner Bistro’s hamburger was a block away and one of the last of the wooden exteriors of the Whitehorse’s home was almost as close. The afternoons of both were more habitable than the evening’s hordes, but it was too hot for beef and too expensive to just be. Freedom was never more costly. I made my way to the river…

Obeying my own music…what else is there for us to do?…little fleas doing a little dance to whatever the band strikes up at any point in our little act here on earth…our own breath stinks up the place, but not that we notice…perfume amid performance…getting tricked out by bank pimps…rent pimps…boss pimps…primed and pumped and positioned to dismiss the obvious and clutch the invisible.

Each recollection, dipped in serontonin, coated with dopamine, seasoned and aged, ripens in the body’s chambers. "Do I dare," and "wet black bough," are not merely poetic phrases in a region where language punishes silence, but seismic occurrences, with flavors of newly tasted cunt and smells of treasure and treason from scripts aged and defiantly brittle.

Cool down, Heller, I said to myself; you better get your ass to the water and have a smoke, you’re becoming too literary and you know how bad that is for you.

pgs 113-115 of 539 From: The Departure Lounge
© 2015 Norman Savage

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS...

In 1959
a bottle
of insulin
was two dollars and thirty-nine cents,
and now it's three,
three hundred, that is. Same bottle,
probably the same pig pancreas.
Back then the cashiers in pharmacy's,
grocery stores, deli's, movie theaters,
streetcars, gas stations,
knew how to make change
without being told
by a computer program.
You could find a pad, mid-sixties,
in NYC for less than a hundred a month
instead of four thousand: same water,
same heat, same crummy landlord; I could
go to Gerdes and listen to Van Ronk,
Oaks, Dylan, Farina & Baez or Trane or Max
or Sonny or Cecil or Miles for less than five
& still have enough for a shot and a beer
or a nickel bag of good reefer.
Gas was 39 cents a gallon, The Fillmore a few bucks,
and a vegetable cream cheese and butter bagel
with a cup of coffee was a dollar
at Ratner's when the night (& the reefer) demanded food
to go on.

It seemed you had to work
for your pleasures back then:
you couldn't give your money
to some dope dealer and hoped he'd come back,
or call a number and have it delivered--you
had to get it yourself
if you didn't want to get beat; you had to read
a whole book or article or the liner notes
of albums and not give a shit whether a million other assholes
liked it or not before
you took a chance.
Screens were
for movie theaters;
there were only certain things
you held in your hand:
someone else's hand,
or heart/your heart,
or your dick.

I don't know
if it's better
or worse now; each
his own, as they say.
I do know there is less
of me
to complain
& to kill.
The rest of you
I leave
to weave
memories
of your own--
good of me
I know.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

IF

you've never been seduced
by a madwoman
you've only known
pedestrian affairs;
if you've never
been to Peter Lugar's,
MacDonalds will suffice;
if you've never read Celine
your brain will be cooled
instead of heated;
if you've never heard Bird,
your flight will be limited;
and if you've never heard Billie
you've never heard the word, "love."
These are obvious
things.

Tonight,
I'm tired.
This poem
will tell
you that.
You have
so many
words
& then
run
out.
Only
for awhile
I hope.
Instead,
I'll watch
a bad team
play
some bad
basketball.
I'll hope
the other
team
carries me
across
a blurry
night.
It's all
I have
to go
on.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014