WHEN MY EX-WIFE WAS BORN

I was already in love
with another woman.
In fact,
I was crazy in love with her.
It moved pieces of me around.
But then,
junk took over,
and made the living
dead & the dead more real
than the living,
but the dead didn't dance
for decades--
until my ex
became my now
& now became new
& shiny.
But then,
the junk took over.
And darkness fell
on a soft
& useless
dick.
These women,
loves of my life,
were born three days
but twenty-six years
apart.
One was straight-laced New Jersey finishing school;
the other radical Japanese artist Nagasaki poor.
The common denominator
was me...
& poetry.
Always is.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2018

WHO KNOWS?

where they are?
or who they're with?
but I have
my suspicions:
one,
I'm pretty sure,
is fucking
a Cuban donkey
on some Havana side street;
another lies
under the sheets
in a psych unit
on a mountain side
in St. Moritz
waiting for a soulful skier
to fly onto her ward
& pirouette around her privates;
and still another,
lost in a memory dream
crosses a wet street
lifting her nun's robe
across her father's sternum.

Imagination dictates reality.

Most likely,
all the old ones,
and ones yet to come,
are battling
old battles.
Reminding themselves
they've misunderstood
themselves & their muses;
that ambivalence balanced
on the tip of her tit
gives her
enormous pleasure
and her sacrifices,
while tragic,
are trifles
as a white girl
sings Mississippi
juke joint blues.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

THE GHOSTS

in my fingers
summon her
animus;
I straddle
her grave.
I've killed her
enough
to mistake
the living
for the dead.

Who
but the loved
know
how many deaths
it takes
to make
a life
together?

Each shadow,
a poem.
Each poem
a shadow.
Let my loves,
the ones
wielding knives,
& machine guns,
cannons,
& bombs,
even words,
step forward--
I'm ready...
for the blindfold.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

ONE HELL OF A YEAR

Plenty of beauty
and plenty of blood.
Both were given
and granted
without
permission.
The body
sometimes moves
without knowing
why.
Such
is life; such
is the task
and the terror
lived
on a border
of disorder.
It's jazz
and jism;
it sticks
to the air;
it's in
your underwear.

I loved the beauty
and needed to be bled.
My alienist helped
cure me
by all this
exposure.
I can't say
it helped; I can say
it worked.

I began last year
in the arms of a love
and will begin this year
in the arms
of another.

(Inside
that and this
parenthesis
was only
misery
with small pockets
of pleasure).

There is
in all this
some kind
of balance.
I know
not
what
this
balance
is. But
I've seen it
through.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014