THOUGHTS BEFORE TURNING IN

The concrete holds
all the pain
of Rome.
No deed
goes unnoticed.
We are the military
disguised as doves.
As the anger of artists
are like farts
in a blizzard,
while white hot cauldrons
of hatred
are mistaken
for crucifixes
& pageants.
The night
sleeps peacefully
while your bones
& mine
stir.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

A HARD DRIVE TO HEAVEN & HELL

I remember this old Irish bitty
buttoned-up to the collar,
in all black,
who made us memorize
the multiplication table
in grammar school.
You'd never want to fuck her,
but you did fear her.
She terrorized our nights
should we not be prepared
for her day's
class.
The next year
she taught me
how to type
on an old manuel,
built like a tank.
Over and over
hitting the letters
to the alphabet hard
and with purpose
until I didn't have to look
at the keys,
but looked at the written word
instead and now only have to listen
as the words form and fly
inside my head.

I memorized every word
my mother read to me
when a child,
and made her stop
when she missed one;
and I memorized her face
in her cardboard coffin
as rigid&angry in death
as in life--maybe more
--at all the living
going on around
and without her.
I memorized batting averages
and the way New Orleans looked
and smelled after a downpour;
I can recall maps
of migrating birds
and all the potential I held
strangled and muted
like the runny obsolescence
of forgotten and abandoned
loves.

I remember each terror
of finding myself
alone
& knowing it will never
be any different
no matter how many arms
embraced & held me.

I have committed
to memory
all the infidelities
and every Lucky Strike
I ever smoked while
memorizing each Dylan song
until I believed
I wrote it.
I can still feel
each time I downshifted
the Porsche's buttered gearbox
and how cool
the breeze felt
easing into a turn at fifty.

I've committed the carnival
to memory and the quirky streets
of Greenwich Village and each time
"love" was on my lips,
and in my steps,
but never meant
to be heard
or seen.
I know each rendition
of Monk and every sip
of whiskey
I took down.

I can quote
every word
of every argument
with every woman
who mattered
and didn't.
How disappointment
was attached
to the hip
and on the breath
as we severed one
from the other.

But most of all
I remember this
afternoon: a chilly
day in April when
it should be warmer;
a thin light falling
across these magic
fingers flying
across the keys; smoke
from a Lucky blue
across the screen.
And you,
sitting
somewhere in the box
waiting
for me
to finish.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

"WHY WON'T YOU TALK TO ME?"

she asked,
one day.
I'd been ducking her
since the moment
I saw her working
next to me.
"You're too beautiful,
I replied,
"too young.
& I'm afraid
I'll say something
stupid
or foolish--
sound ridiculous,
or look like a horse's ass."
Her eyes
lowered.
She blushed.
Then smiled.

It takes a lifetime
of experience
with the woman
to know exactly
what to say...
and when.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

"ETERNITY," A DEFINITION:

The time

between

you coming

& them




leaving.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

LOVE BREATHS

Sometimes,
not often
enough,
but sometimes
I can hear
a pure distillation
of love--pauses,
hesitations,
puffs of breath
(when speech
is another form
of agony)
--coming through
my phone
at work.
I'd be speaking
to one half
of a couple
whose other half
has horrendous problems:
a stroke has left them paralyzed
on one or both sides, aphasic;
or ALS is shutting down all their systems
(and will slowly, slowly, suffocate them);
heart disease, COPD, dementia
in all its permutations, lost, bewildered,
becoming aged
children needing
a young mother
a spirited father,
but the partner
is old, too,
or has to work
or has other children
to raise.
Each life
a nightmare
of varying proportions;
each looking
for a solution
which doesn't involve
giving up
and shelving,
warehousing,
their other
half.
After doing this for awhile
there's a build-up
of callus that occurs
inside your ear
& in your heart
to life's calamities
except your own.
You have enough
of your own shit
to think of: your boss
only wants you to make
the next call,
the next sale,
and you know
the rent
is right
around the corner.

But every once in awhile
you hear a purer love,
a refusal to give in
to sickness, mess,
the loss of identity,
and sometimes
it happens
to the young, those under
sixty, those whose lives
are not supposed to go,
but do: wasting away
from a rogue gene, becoming
sightless and mute,
no longer able to hold a spoon
or a piece of toilet paper.
Life,
in all its indignities.
And I hear that,
that courage,
that determination,
that unwillingness
to have anything to do
with reality,
and it gets inside me,
wiggles around,
unclogs these cynical neurons,
bloodstream, veins and arteries,
pumps my heart with blood
and bucks up what is admittedly
a weak and cowardly backbone.

It takes some fucking courage
for one to do that
for another--
no matter who the fuck it is.
We call it "love"
but it's not really.
It's something that defies words
& precedes speech.
And it's something
that most of us
will never have to do...
or want to do.

Nothing frightens me
as much
as the human
race.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

THIS IS THE BURIAL GROUNDS

for elephants. Actually,
for stupid elephants; elephants
that were left back,
never made it out of grade school,
dimwitted elephants, schized elephants,
moronic & crazy elephants;
elephants who were too smart
for their own good, rebellious
elephants, boozing elephants,
dope shooting elephants,
jazz playing elephants;
elephants whose tusks
are chipped, broken, stained
with jungle nicotine; bull elephants
who can no longer bull their way
into elephant snatch; lady elephants
who no longer emit an inviting odor;
old fat wrinkled & almost
used up elephants;
whittled
to a nub
elephants,
but elephants who
can still dial
a phone...
& still sell
whatever shit
you put
in a brown paper bag...
circumcised elephants
with a merchant's soul,
a survivor's bloodline;
blind wanderers
with busted suitcases
filled with,
and leaking,
sorrow.

They are
as crazy
as shit-house
rats, who can smell
you once
& remember you
always.
A very hip
tribe.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

MY NEW GIRLFRIEND

was here with me
watching the Pacquiao/Bradley fight
while I was fooling around
with words on the Mac
when my old girlfriend's email
landed in my in-box.
I read it.
And read it again.
"C'mere," I said,
"I want ya ta read this."
She pulled herself away
from the blood letting
and into another ring.
She read it.
And read it again.
"I don't know," she said,
"nobody knows anybody."
I smiled.
"That's what Roth said;
wait here, lemme read it ta ya."
I got up and got "American Pastoral"
and sat in my desk chair. She
was sitting underneath me,
her head swiveling
to the other fight
"Listen to this:
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
"I like it when you read to me, baby.
Let's get under those flannel sheets
and watch the rest of this in bed.
At least tonight we don't haveta fight--
we'll get it as right as we can."

Someday--
maybe in a week, a month, a year
--she'll dislike me, too. Maybe
even hate me?
And maybe,
if I'm lucky,
I'll be
long gone
by then?

Maybe.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014