EVEN THE SIMPLE IS COMPLICATED ENOUGH

I take myself out
for a bite to eat
to the same Greek dive
I've been goin to for 35 years
now. Hell,
been livin in my pad for over 40--
but who's counting?
Nick & Paul,
the owners,
have seen me
in many different states
through many decades:
sober, drunk, young, wild,
old, wild, high, low,
indifferent, maniacal, calm,
pensive and apoplectic.
I've sat isolated
and speechless
or boisterous and boorish.
I've littered their booths
with the scents of women
and love and the smell of
defeats; defeats from jobs,
publishers, women, friends,
and body. What I do,
and who I'm with,
no longer raise their eyebrows
or lowers their lids.
I've eaten their eggs & ham,
bacon & sausages & pancakes,
homemade moussaka, bread pudding,
& brisket, drank their coffee
& stirred their little creamers
& watched their children age
& them grow old.
I've seen favorite waiters & waitresses
farmed out to pasture because their legs
cannot get rid of the water & have ballooned
as big as their waist. The only person
who didn't age
is me.
Neurotics don't age
but hold fast
& hold on.

Today,
I had a hamburger, fries, salad.
It was the same bottle of oil,
the same vinegar, the same tomato
& the same slice of onion; the burger
was thinner, the bun bigger; the fries
still frozen & pretty much
as tasteless as ever,
but the price has tripled.
And why not?:
the farms are dry,
crops roasted,
cows suicidal,
the beef chemical.
The half-buck & buck tip
is now two or three.
Nick & Paul tell me
they'll soon retire;
they're tired of working
for the landlord.
But not me. I can't
retire--I'm a poet.
And poets are not supposed to "work,"
they only have to "live"--
which is the harder,
and more complicated,
of the two
I think I know,
but will never ever
say.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

TRAYVON MARTIN & ALL US NIGGERS

Yeah,
you heard right:
we all niggers.
Everyone who has to get up
every mornin,
put on some black face
and do some mindless
fuckin shit
just to pay rent
are niggers.
Even the niggers
who dance
on basketball courts,
the quote unquote "gridiron",
the jeweled green
of baseball pastures,
are niggers entertaining
all the rest of us
to sell us a beer
another car
hemorrhoid tolerance,
chicks
who we'll
never get
and never
got. Just so
we can drag our ass
into work the next day
and wonder where
the time went.
They have this figured out:
they pay us just enough
so we have to show-up
on Monday.
We know this.
We know this country's
racist: big fuckin deal?

There is no more Martha
and The Vandellas. No more
dancin in the streets. In fact,
no more Motor City. No more Newark.
Even New York is pretty,
dignified, safe
for all the corporate hustle.
The avant-garde's gum'
are bleeding; all the teeth
have been shaken loose
and lie like pebbles
in God's rectum.
The gears are oiled
the commerce continues
with no one to fall
on the machinery.
We are
a tame lot.
The preachers
have been bought; their
protests are funded
by the people protested
against. It is all
one big circle jerk
and it's our dicks
getting pulled.

I humbly suggest
that the Jordans,
the Kobes, the Riveras,
the James', the C.C's,
the Jeters, the Denzels,
the Spikes, the Lee's,
the Smiths, the Berry's,
who have squirreled away
millions walk
the fuck off the field,
the court, the stage,
and not sell another
motherfuckin thing.
The only thing this cunt of a country knows
is money and how to fuck for it.
They have to feel it
to believe it.
If they don't
don't wear
hoodies and walk
as if you mean it.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013