CALLING DR. FREUD

Vell, it's obvious, no?
He is trying to replicate
his greatest success,
his only success:
The Apprentice.
All his other business'
went into the shithole, no?:
Airline, Steaks, Water,
A Charity, A University,
A Football Team, Buildings, even Casinos (where
only the most incompetent
can't make a dollar)--Poof! Gone!
Only his Daddy's money
(and that was very stinky money, too),
bailed him out until other Daddys
allowed him only to keep his name
while they made the shit.

But The Apprentice, ah, The Apprentice,
that was his. He could be his boorish,
stupid stumbling self & still rule
the little office where syncophants went
to grovel to the mushroom capped cock
underneath a desk of make believe.
It is there, in the safey
of his home, he wants people--
and now cities & states--
to slug it out.
He wants people
to beg
before he hires.
He wants bodies
to contort,
to agonize.
He wants to see
all the states
all the cities
who betrayed him
turn on each other
in a feeding frenzy
for money, for equipment,
for a breath;
he wants those cities & states
to bring those trucks,
those iceboxes,
so he can see
in real time
with his racoon eyes
the dead carted out
to wait to be planted.
He loves this;
it's what he lives for.

Today, on this Friday, March 27th, afternoon,
he's already started to primp himself--
plastic hair, orange flesh--
for his daily fix:
a "news" conference
where his mouth--
looking more like a turkey's asshole--
will emit today's droppings:
small hard pellets of shit.
He will stand above the fray
& select the reporters he deigns to favor
with more lies
knowing full well
the havoc
& death
he stokes.

All this talk,
all this handwringing,
& all this breastbeating &
all these acts of courage,
is for naught.
He is
his one & only firament light
that he navigates by;
he is the only star
in this show.
He cannot
& will not
give that up.

There is only one word
for this disease, my friends;
one word that captures
a pathology for which
there is no escape--
that word
must be
love.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

JUNK SICK

Maybe it starts with a flutter,
a body vibration
in the tips of your fingers
or a ripple behind your neck.
Perhaps it begins with voices
vying for space in a motel
where the No Vacancy neon
has lost a letter or two.
Maybe that's followed
by a craving for stillness;
or maybe there are ghosts
in your morning coffee;
or perhaps there is a silence
of love
and its perils:
your mother's nipple, once,
as big as your thumb,
now receding from view,
the slam of a door
and your lover's footsteps
retreating and getting fainter
as the evening's rush swallows
what you thought was;

or maybe it starts
with some success--
accidental or not
and suddenly you're naked
standing in a forest
of doubt, surrounded
by fear,
a feeling of fraud
corroding the wires
to your heart, disbelief
punching your worth silly;

or perhaps it comes
from nothing, a nowhere day
in November, idle thoughts,
dreamless, stagnant,
until you look, unknowingly,
at a vein
in the crook of your arm
scarred over
from how many times you've traveled down it,
hundreds, maybe thousands of times,
sliding the spike in
like getting into well-worn slippers,
and you remember the ease and the warmth
of the amniotic highway,
suckling, murmuring, nurturing
a life you blessedly know nothing of,
yet know where the key to all things
is hidden.

You now are able to locate the ache
and lean, ever so gently,
into remedies
that can take seconds or years
as your unconscious churns
to fulfil. But no matter--
you have nothing
but time.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

THERE IS NO GREATER THRILL

for a drug addict
than finding a drug
that you thought
had skipped out
on you.
Today,
it was a baby aspirin,
81 miligrams
in a tiny yellow Beyer dot
that helps thin my blood
in my heart holy clogged universe.
It was hiding
behind my coffee pot
and the thick black cord
connecting it
into the socket
behind that.
I had thought
I'd looked there yesterday
but musta missed it after
looking on the floor,
gas range and crack
between the icebox
& cleaning cabinet.
Shit, I'd said then,
and shook out
another pill.

It's not that I think
about medications
of all kinds
but obsess about them too.
If I wasn't taking drugs,
if I wasn't sick
who would I be?

Drugs have been my savior.
Drugs have been my confidant,
my muse, my benefactress and
my regulator; they've been the elixer
for this coward's blood:
They've gotten me up
in the morning & coaxed me into bed
at night giving me purpose
& dreams in this hellish game
of Truth or Consequences.

Soon, if I do everything right
or nothing at all, a door will open
on its own.
I've stashed Dramamine
every place I could think of
just in case.
Call me crazy
or call me Ishmael, I don't care.
But prepared
I will be.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

INTIMACIES

I'm sick,
I said.
My girlfriend
lying next to me
said nothing.
I tried again:
Goddamn, I'm fucking sick,
I said louder.
What else is new?
she replied,
you're always sick
about something.
Two black flies,
mad with summer heat
were either fighting
or fucking
on the screen
beside the bed;
the heat circulated
by their wings
& a cheap fan.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2018

2 SHIT SANDWICHES:

One,
full of childish morbidities;
the other,
an old shrew
full of meanness and greed;
one born of bigotry
& brownshirts;
the other raised
in Goldwater's piss;
one's dick
a wrinkled spigot;
the other's cunt
a Sahara of madness.

Go ahead,
take a bite.
I dare you.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

IT'S A BITTER PILL

to wake-up
sick
and alone
and south
of sixty.
Your chest
hurts
from an impossible
cough;
the phlegm
so thick
it sticks
to the side
of the drain;
your throat
beat-up
& raw;
hot eyes
& hotter
forehead.
Your bones
ache;
you're cold
& hot
& cold
again.
No one
asks
anything
of you
because
no one's
there;
no one
brings
an aspirin,
hot tea,
a kind
word--
mom
is long
dead;
your wife
has long
split;
breasts
have been
milked.
The cow
gives
nothing
but kicks.
Your ass
is exposed.
The doctor
is out
or busy
or needs
a doctor.
His nurse
sleeps
with the
orderly
& he
pushes
his own
pills.

You've arrived
at Coney Island's
nakedness;
the Stillwell Avenue
of the soul.
The train
stalls, the conductor
is a madman.
You take
a deep breath
& leap.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

EXISTENIALISM--A MOST BITTER PILL

Sick
& alone
ain't so bad--
when young
but on the south side
of sixty
it fuckin sucks.

Wake up
& realize
nobody
gives a shit
about your fever,
your stomach,
your head or
your heart.
Nobody
to bring you
a compress,
a cup of tea
or spoonful
of forgetting,
or even
an aspirin.
Your ass
is exposed.
You've arrived
at the Stillwell Avenue's
terminal
of the soul.

Have a good
day.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

LOVE BREATHS

Sometimes,
not often
enough,
but sometimes
I can hear
a pure distillation
of love--pauses,
hesitations,
puffs of breath
(when speech
is another form
of agony)
--coming through
my phone
at work.
I'd be speaking
to one half
of a couple
whose other half
has horrendous problems:
a stroke has left them paralyzed
on one or both sides, aphasic;
or ALS is shutting down all their systems
(and will slowly, slowly, suffocate them);
heart disease, COPD, dementia
in all its permutations, lost, bewildered,
becoming aged
children needing
a young mother
a spirited father,
but the partner
is old, too,
or has to work
or has other children
to raise.
Each life
a nightmare
of varying proportions;
each looking
for a solution
which doesn't involve
giving up
and shelving,
warehousing,
their other
half.
After doing this for awhile
there's a build-up
of callus that occurs
inside your ear
& in your heart
to life's calamities
except your own.
You have enough
of your own shit
to think of: your boss
only wants you to make
the next call,
the next sale,
and you know
the rent
is right
around the corner.

But every once in awhile
you hear a purer love,
a refusal to give in
to sickness, mess,
the loss of identity,
and sometimes
it happens
to the young, those under
sixty, those whose lives
are not supposed to go,
but do: wasting away
from a rogue gene, becoming
sightless and mute,
no longer able to hold a spoon
or a piece of toilet paper.
Life,
in all its indignities.
And I hear that,
that courage,
that determination,
that unwillingness
to have anything to do
with reality,
and it gets inside me,
wiggles around,
unclogs these cynical neurons,
bloodstream, veins and arteries,
pumps my heart with blood
and bucks up what is admittedly
a weak and cowardly backbone.

It takes some fucking courage
for one to do that
for another--
no matter who the fuck it is.
We call it "love"
but it's not really.
It's something that defies words
& precedes speech.
And it's something
that most of us
will never have to do...
or want to do.

Nothing frightens me
as much
as the human
race.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014