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

I SOUND LIKE AHAB

walking the deck
of The Pequod.
I thump
up & down
the empty stairs
of my brownstone
with my cane
sounding my own
particular madness
raging at God's
insensitive deafness
& my brown & drying
departed youth;
a body
in the midst
of rebellion
& decay.

I will give any man
this enigmatic gold doubloon if,
with this harpoon,
forged by a devil's fire,
to find for me
a memory
that doesn't speak
in simple sentences,
but rhapsodizes in soliloquies
righteous of prosaic complications--
going one step
to the next,
going out
& coming home
& warming myself
by the word furnace
of make believe
so elementary
& so endless.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

RUSSIA HAS THE GOOD SENSE

to look backwards
at my poetry--
they must feel
the rawness
of my youth
when the blood-jet
was greatest.
I was young enough
not to know
what I was doing,
but did it anyway.
I figured
I'd leave
my mistakes
for other people
to find.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2018

ARE YOU A WHORE?

I ask a little girl
who passes me
in the hot summer air.
She displays
a peacock's plummage
on top of her head:
streaks of green/blue/magenta/red
hair, black leather studded garb,
black fishnets ripped & torn up
up to her cunt & cheeks of her ass,
nose rings/ear rings/lip rings
snarl from her face.
Her mouth curls
as if I'd said something wrong
or beyond the pale:
Go Fuck Yerself,
she says.
A most reasonable request,
I think,
for a much
younger
man.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

IN THE PRIVACY

of my apartment
I find myself
weeping a lot.
I hear about veterans
committing suicide
for stuff their bloated
bellies can't keep down;
I see dogs abandoned
and caged and shivering
and naked beyond their understanding;
I see mothers weeping
from a sidewalk ricochet;
I watch a foreign paraplegic
grasp a diploma and future
between two of her working fingers;
I read a young woman's grasp
of a tilting and incomprehensible world.

I've been a defensive man.
Quick to anger
& quicker to judge.
I've tried to play
it safe and found
no safety in that.
There is some kind of muscle
memory of heroism; maybe
I'm Greek and have absorbed
some ancient blood myths.
I don't know.
But the world has bloomed
despite thoughts of cruelty.
I've seen shapes
seemingly unimpressive
impress most of all.
I'm an old dog
learning how
to become
young.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

NOTHING MUCH HAS CHANGED...

except the gray hairs
around my balls &
the wrinkled spigot
that serves
as my dick.
But my brain
still gets as hard
as Chinese algebra.
And so I'm taken
by surprise
when folks my age
smile & say hello
as they pass me
reading or smoking
a cigarette or both
while I sit
on a stoop
in the shade
on a beautiful brownstone perch
in Greenwich Village.

The young ones
without a crease
or a care pass
as if I didn't exist...
& I don't...
for them.
Sometimes a "father thing"
glides by and I get a look
but little more.
But the old ones & I
exchange a smile, even banter
a bit--how's the book; it's hot;
nice weather; live here long--
small talk that connects us.
They think they have nothing to fear
and I don't try to dissuade them.
They are not in a rush,
but I am...I've always been
in a rush and more times
than not
have blown past the money.
Most feel no danger
coming off of me...I hope
they're wrong.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THE GOOD & THE BAD

Miss Susie,
as she was called,
or Susannah Mushatt Jones
her birth name as she was known,
died yesterday
at 116 years of age
in Brooklyn; the last
of those born in the eighteen hundreds
in Lowndes County, Alabama.
Goddamn!
I've got
another 50 years (at least) to go
of watching Law & Order reruns
to beat her.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

CAN I POSSIBLY BE

this old?
I don't think so
in spite of all
my body tells me.
I don't think
I am time
& time only--
though I carry
a King's baggage
like a Pullman Porter
in the Georgia summer
heat.
I would like to think
I fuck with time
as much as it
fucks with me:
I can be seven
when I want to,
hanging on a limb
from a garden snake;
or seventeen
& hanging by a thread;
but not the sixty-eight
I am just hanging
around waiting
for the curtains to part.
Only yesterday
my berry browned arms
swung from trees
& my hands held wood
carved to strike a hardball;
my fingers held a pen
meant to seduce
& buck-up a weakened bone.
I can see with clarity
all which came before,
but not a moment after
it all stops.
And where, I might ask,
do we go
then?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

THERE ARE FEW THINGS MORE SATISFYING

than a good
bowel movement
especially
at a certain age.
In fact,
it's one of the few things
to look forward to.

What else
do the young
need to know?

I suppose,
though,
that as long
as they can
blow out
the candles
a hearty
"fuck you"
is in
that breath
as well.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

I MISS

the spongy
sea-soaked
boardwalk.
I miss the white
Converse sneakers
that walked it.
I miss the taste
of warm gin
drunk on the moist sand
holding the hand
of a young girl
anticipating
the first kiss.
I miss double features
on a wet Saturday
afternoon for a quarter
and hot buttered popcorn
and bonbons
and Milk Duds
sticking between teeth.
I miss my top teeth.
I miss my four toes.
I miss her titties
so soft and powdered
by Johnson&Johnson
and I miss being scared
I'd break them.
I miss the first time
I punched my father
& frightened him.
I miss the absence
of memory.
I miss all the bookmarks,
in all the pages,
and all the expectation
that welcomed me
and disinvited the world.
I miss the stupidity
of youth--your youth,
my youth, our youth.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

WORDS

like youth
will, one day,
wake-up
& run;
they'll
take off
for greener pastures.
You'll chase
after them,
instinctually,
& trip
on a memory
or two.

Watch
your
step.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

SHELF LIFE

You hit sixty
and you start to smell
your expiration date;
and your culture--
if you live
in one of the world's
money jungles
--smells it, too.

If any attention
was paid
to your youth
your youth
has been stamped
and paid for:
Nothing
owed.
It's cruel
and harsh,
I know,
but really
very
unemotional.

I mean,
what can you
really offer?
except wisdom?
and we know
what the world
does with that.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014