THERE'S A HERBERT WALKER BUSH

and there's a Yossarian
& a mad prophet of chance
winking in a corner. Rembrandt
couldn't have done
better: Gods & clowns
warily circle each other.
So great is our love
of pagentry
& eccentricity:
a laugh,
a tear.
Our body's crazy symmentry
duking it out
on luck's battlefields.
My betrayal
has never been
to country
but to self;
it's the only thing
making me a soldier.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2018

MY BROTHER

is sick.
His life
is littered
with addiction
like a NYC subway
is blanketed with disease.
My family tree
has syringes
hanging off the branches.
And each branch
has fucked each other
royally: absence, suffocation,
adultery, lies, betrayals, coke,
weed, booze, pills, and
that grandmaster,
heroin. Arms shot,
noses gone, lungs coal mined,
jobs destroyed, homes foreclosed,
cars repossessed, heirlooms pawned.
Few
have made it out
at any age,
but I did.
I got lucky.
After 50 years
of trying to fill
an inside straight,
I changed the game.
I found fear,
healthy fear.
I did not want
to die. Not
at 52, not
like this;
not then;
not now
at 68.

My brother
is stuck
in an addict's nightmare:
too easy to cop,
too hard to refuse.
His brain
is turning
to mush.
But after four years
I've persuaded him
to go into a program.
In all probability
it won't work,
but there's a shot
it will. If you're willing
to change the hand
& gamble in a game
where you don't know
the rules you might
get lucky
too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

HUMPTY DUMPTY CATCHES A BREAK

Nearly two years ago
she pushed me
off a perch
in Toronto
and I tumbled
back to NYC
where, like a frozen piece of Bonomo's Turkish Taffy,
smashed upon a marble table top,
I broke
into a million bite-sized pieces.

I was sixty-six
and had never wanted
anyone to love me
so badly. And
even though I knew
it was her own fear,
her own prison and
her own poison
guarding her gate, I felt
old, fat, poor
and powerless.

I hated my job
& now hated it more;
I ducked & bobbed & wove
& didn't care if I sold
& made enough for rent or not--
until I couldn't make rent.
Unemployment carried me
until it didn't; friends carried me
until they couldn't & another half-ass job carried me
until they wouldn't.

I pawned the only things left
of my parents & closed the coffin
from which they screamed; I pawned my books
& numbed my own wails, but still I wrote,
still I listened to music and still I listened
to my shrink who asked I give him
everything I could
except for money.
"Savage is he who saves himself,"
Leonardo wrote. I sent away a hundred resumes,
made a hundred calls. Agencies had closed,
contacts had died or didn't return phone calls;
and I was old for a man
with no money, no certificates, no advanced degrees.
I sought out government agencies,
went through the most demeaning explanations of failures
and accepted handouts and help from every and any anonymous hand.
I sat for hour after hour after hour surrounded
by a living death,
smelling stillbirth dreams,
listening to babies wail,
in halls that held a few hundred of life's satisfied customers
without apartments, homes, money, food, or hope. Filled out
form after form after form went on interview after interview.
Knowing full well that a few scant years ago I sat
on the other side of that desk.

I was luckier than most.
I've always been luckier than most
with jobs, women, and the few friends I allowed
to get close. I met someone at an agency who
liked me who introduced me to someone else
who also liked me. Week after week,
even though I did not have much hope
I hoped and went. A gig opened up
& he pushed & pushed harder after HR told him
I didn't meet certain requirements. He pushed
harder. I met with two VP's of the program
who were impressed and were able to circumvent
some requirements & welcomed me aboard. Which
is what "Getting Another Shot At It" is about.
The city & a private charity
has paid my rent for the past five months.
I feel like a shit heel
but I'll get over it...most of it.

There will be no healing
the fractures I feel
in my soul; no getting over
her or the kind of love
I have for her.
There isn't supposed to be.
But life has its own Crazy Glue.
You stick to it long enough
those crazy bones knit
in their own screwy way. Not
the way they were when you entered
but enough to get you to the exit.
And who knows?
there might be someone
with a flat tire,
or a thumb out,
or a woman splitting
from a convent
along the way.
Who am I
to say no?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

SOMEBODY HAD TO LIVE THIS LIFE

Were you gonna do it?
Were you?
Or you?
Or you?
No
you weren't.
It was up to me
to draw
to an inside straight
& get my parents
& get their crazy lineage
& language & cultivate their
sperm & eggs & zygote & shit
& get waylaid, side swiped
with a naive but monstrous
sentimental emotional stupidity
nurturing a sugar fear,
a people fear a crowd fear, a fear
of self & sustainability
in a home of sickness & sustenance.

Raise your hand
if you want diabetes & dope,
institutions & dangling
from the puppet strings
of failure.

I didn't think so.

But how about
if I threw in Bird
& Billie
& Bach
& Beethoven
& Bukowski?
And I'm not even
out of the"B's" yet.
How about Beckett
& bowling
& black beauties,
& Brahms?

How about Coeds
from Harvard
& Bennington
who play
the piano
& know your
secrets better
than you do?
How about Coney Island
when it was Coney Island?

Nobody becomes
who they are
until they live
who they are.
And if they
don't do it
who the fuck
will?

Like you
reading this
now. What
will you do?
Stand pat
or make
a move?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

THE COFFEE SHOP COUNTESS

would jerk-off
a few of us
in jr. high school.
She'd sit there,
sipping hot cocoa,
a mountain
of whipped cream
mustaching her lip.
Her big brown eyes
mascara thick
watching us
loiter in our Mermaid Ave
Huba-Huba sanctuary.
She was part French
part Jewish and all firecracker hot,
though she chose her times
to ignite us. Mostly she sat,
reading and laughing at what she read
or what we said or what we did--
which was nothing much.
Sometimes she came over to one of us,
sat down and pushed her face into
one of our necks. Our breaths froze.
She would look into our eyes
& without warning,
kiss us,
sticking her tongue into our mouths,
& just as suddenly get up & leave.
Hardly any words were exchanged.
Other times she'd grab hold of a hand
and take one of us into a back booth.
She'd rub the outside of our jeans
until we came--it didn't take long.
Steve once asked if
he could touch her tit
for luck?
What's luck? she asked.
You know, he stumbled, good luck.
What is this good luck? she pressed.
Stickball, he said, we have a stickball game after school.
I don't know this stickball, she said, but here touch it.
We all watched as Steve stuck his hand down her blouse
and grinned the adolescent grin.

She never came back after that.
Bad luck for us: We lost her
& the game that day.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

SO STUPID IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE

There was Seymour
and now Robin. Before
those two gents
there was David,
Ernie, Sylvia, Anne,
John & John and,
I'm sure other
John's; & please
don't forget Vinny,
Dino, Marilyn, Amy,
and many lost fools,
like myself, who couldn't
find their way home
with a map.

It has always been
a hard life; work,
love, bread, adulation,
has little to do
with it; it's just
fucking hard.
You can turn over
the rocks & discover
a new enzyme, a new hormone,
a new molecule, insanities
lurking around the corners
of your birth, teachers
with bad breath & dandruff,
mustard sandwiches & Draino chasers,
and would be no closer in discerning
the link and linkages
of how you view yourself
or the world.

Tonight,
if you're not knotting
a rope or loading a shotgun,
if you're not shivering
in your closet more afraid
of the light than the dark;
if there's a pop tart
or a pancake or a cup
of black coffee for
tomorrow morning or
a slice of almost green bologna
for tonight's fare...
that is enough, it is enough
to turn on your radio
& blast yourself away
& into a space
that gives you space
and that will be
good enough--it has
to be.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

LETTING THE GAME

come to you
is something I do
more and more
these days.
I've put in
the work.
The poem seems
to assert itself
without self-
mutilation
or too much
affect.
I've become
an old fuck
that a few
young women
want to fuck
around with.
They're beautiful
& smart & do not
take me
too seriously
though they enjoy
my stories, my rants,
and my cynicism
which make them laugh.
I am the bone
of a Brontosaurus
they toss around.
They don't mind
my half
a hard-on
half the time,
& a slowness
of foot.
They've accompanied me
to doctors & have made me
dinner. It is more
than enough.
The few I'm still close with
understand that parents
& teachers, religious leaders
& politicians do nothing
except destroy; that pain
is endless
& love hides
in all the obvious places
if one is willing to read
the cards.

It's taken me
quite awhile
to learn
the simplest
of things:
money is piss
and the sparrow
immortal.
Courage
is more important
for our most frightened
and fucked-over;
and getting across freeways
blindfolded without a scratch
is more than just
dumb luck.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014