TWO NURSES, A TIGHT CLOSET, AND ME

positioned between them
the heat from their white purity
invading my pubescent hospital pajamas
flushing my cheeks
igniting my regions
as I Bobby Darined my way
through Mack the Knife.
1959 was the year,
diabetes the disease,
Brooklyn the place,
an all male hospital ward my home
of dreams, rock 'n roll,
& trouble
percolating like a virus gone wild
in a rapidly aging eleven year old body
finger snappin, pretending
I was both the singer
& the song.

After the fear
loosed its grip
& needles & shots & tubes
snaking from mouths & assholes & veins
to bottles hidden beneath beds
or crucified on poles
& strange & bearded men
lost their ghostliness,
my body regained its hum
and my little Panasonic its life.
She stood propped against the door,
in all her beauty, her starched white uniform
& pronged pointed hat atop her cornsilk hair
couldn't conceal a body wanting to explode
from its confinement, watching me
mouthing lyrics, snapping fingers,
and gyrating against the pillows
allowing Bobby's hipness to take me
to where I wasn't.
I couldn't have known
that everything we are
or was going to be
was held in a tune.

I caught her
watching & smiling
a smile that wasn't--
a smile meant for a lover,
a smile that wasn't cute
but coquettish; a smile
on a different highway
with a different destination.
She held her slim index finger
up in the air...soon she was back
with another nurse. Slowly
they came to my bedside
& she reached for my hand
& led me, on trembly legs
to a supply closet across the hall
where they pressed against me:
"Sing it again, baby," she coaxed me,
"just like before."
I began to stammer.
"It's OK, baby, sing it again,
just like before."
And just like that
I snapped my fingers, found the beat,
& the shark came out
to play.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

FUCK WALTER MISCHEL

and his marshmellow test.
Who in their right mind
would wait a year to eat
two marshmellows when
you can eat one now?
And that's supposed to tell me
who will cure cancer
and who will die of cancer?
Gimme the marshmellow
now. I've been
a heat seeking
guided pleasure missle
before I knew what pleasure was:
put a bag of dope,
a scotch neat,
a jelly bean or two or three, or a hundred thousand,
or Milky Way,
a piece of ass, a pair of tits,
three of a kind, or Royal Flush,
even a parting of lips
in front of me,
and I'm a gonner.
How about a warm apple pie
cradling a Hagan-Daz scoop of vanilla--
I'd crawl over my mother
to get next to that.
Wait a year!? Are you outta yer mind!?
I want to get the fuck outta me now,
motherfucker. What is pleasure about?
I want to lose myself; I want to get lost:
Lost in wine, in women, in poetry, in song.
That is how you find things
out. You lose control, you go crazy...
for a second, a week, a month, years.
Unfortunately,
most don't.
What horrible lives
they must lead.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

CONEY ISLAND BABY

This poem is A's...

"If they had no madness in them, they were useless; genius doesn't speak with the limited tongue of sense."
--C.E. Morgan

A nitrous oxide summer.
Slick & honeyed mouths
of cotton candy, girl pink
& fushcia, yellows/blues/reds,
candy apples caramel thick
on gooey sticks; pavement
suction cupping sneakers;
a hiss of franks
charring & popping juices;
sweet salt twisting
nipples & noses.
Rats, in the moist sand,
sticking their whiskers
into bags of Nathan's fries.

I was traveling
into a dark wood,
around the arms
of sailors
& their girls,
crisscrossing a huckster's moan
inviting bravery born
in a man's bone
& the pitch of nickels & quarters--
an alchemist's delight
in life's chances
& chances taken--
hyped-up & erect
against the steely teeth
of zippers.

Night is not dark,
but forgiving.
Boardwalks are lenient.
Songs are simple
laments of longing.
Each wave,
a sensation
brokered
by a semicolon.
I was lost
& still am.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016