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

THERE YOU WERE

For J.

stuck
between two copies
of "Changes"
my first publication,
1967. They were yellow
with age, darkened
by NYC's sand-like grime,
musty smelling, brittle,
but not your pages
of poetry. They
leapt & kissed
& fondled memories hot
with the quivering pulse
of desire, erasing
four decades
in two breaths.

Who sez you can't read
& dance
at the same time? You
were my black orchid,
my narcissistic muse.
You were my narcotic...
and necrotic.
You were everything
I thought a disturbed poet
should aspire to
and be with: delicate,
beautiful, brilliant,
reckless...& married.
You found me
when you could
& found time
when you couldn't. How
your upper body would twist
around the gear shift
as I drove
and stammered
about poetry
while you
were actually
writing it.

"Heroin" and "Misty Roses"
informed us and highways
we tumbled down had no exits.
Our belief in a sorcerer's alchemy
made us ripe for our own lies.
Still, I would not change
nor exchange a minute
of what we were then
for another peaceful minute
of what I am now.
I have to believe
you feel the same.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016