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

SATURDAY NIGHTS ON A CONEY ISLAND BEACH

we'd lean our backs
against the concrete bunker
built during the second world war
to look for ships & subs
who might try to fuck with us,
and our shoulders and arms
would touch and I'd pass her
the joint
and then the bottle
of wine and we'd look
into the blackness
and tell each other
secrets no one else knew:
her mom used a hair brush
on her while my father choose
a belt buckle; he ripped farts
in the middle of the night
waking us up while her mother shacked
with a family friend next door.
I ran my hand along her thigh
and marveled at this easy intimacy;
how I hid and ran and dodged
and she told me I didn't have to do that anymore...
and neither did she.

We sauntered along the boardwalk
to Nathan's and had a gloppy Chow Mein Sandwich
and a Beef Bar-B-Q bun for a buck
and shared a large fries for 50 cents more.
The night had sharp jaws and edges,
but we had our own space, enough
to feel safe within as she slid her hand
through my back pocket as natural
as the stars coming out while the salted air
alerted my nipples and I reached over
and put my hand inside her shirt
and found one of hers and she jerked
and laughed and I laughed and I knew
I had some more pot in my pocket and
would not be going home
for a long long time and might
catch a beating for that but that
didn't enter my mind.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017