ALL ABOARD

Memory is a motherfucker;
It can't be trusted.
Especially your memory.
Your memory was always
suspect. You know it
and I know it.
Still,
we get on board.
You never know,
do you,
where it's going
or how
it's gonna get there?
It always surprises you--
thinking you're taking the express
& discovering, after the doors close,
it's running on local tracks.
And it ain't being sung
by Curtis Mayfield or Al Green
or The Persuasions; in fact,
nothing's being sung
yet everything is heard
in this melodic atonal cacophony
above the grinding of the wheels.
It's an unreliable train
ferrying an unreliable narrator
whose perfect sense
is unimpeachable.
All those stops
stopped at
and stopped up
and stopped still:
I look for Milk Tit Avenue, but round
Daddy's Bend; try to lower my eyes at
Agony Way; try a detour to Women's Wonder Wheel,
but fall into Judy's Triangle;
jump off Heroin Cliff; get back at Hope Lookout,
and avoid Church Street completely
except in fact while Masturbation Circle
appears again and again but less and less
as the brakes grind down.

Luck
has played a part,
and an absent minded conductor
has not yet punched
my ticket.
Your trip, of course,
is different.
And the seat
next to me
is always
empty.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

DOING A POST-MORTEM ON SANTA

No sign
of strangulation,
no cerebral
hemorrhaging,
not a gun shot
or knife wound
on him; no
broken bones,
not even a sprain;
his liver's fucked,
but I expected that
with all those burst
blood vessels in his nose;
he's too fat
to have froze,
and his dick,
though small,
is in working order.

But his face,
his face was so sad,
so serious,
I took another look.
You see his heart?
Enlarged.
Three times
the size.
You see inside?
Regret,
pain,
love,
loneliness.
More than a man
should have
to hold.

A friend told me
that they told him
not to make the trip.
Told me,
that he was never
really a gift giver
to begin with.
That he was in
no kind of shape
to travel.
But few men
listen; women, too,
by the way.

I just hope
the next one,
sick with love,
believes them.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014