Wednesday, April 9, 2014

CHECKING TO SEE IF I'M DEAD


I got up this morning
early as usual
after a nighttime of battles
remembered and otherwise...
and nothing ached.
Nothing.
I swung my legs easily
out of bed
& stood up
without wobbling.
Jabbed my finger
with a pen-let
to take a blood sugar test
and it was quite within normal limits
then went to the john
to take a piss
& took it
standing up.
Very strange,
I said to myself,
and glided into my kitchen
& got the coffee started
without the old pot exploding
or shorting another fuse...
jumped into the shower
and regulated the hot&cold
without singing my balls
or freezing to death
with aplomb and sophistication.
Plenty of soap,
plenty of lather,
plenty of shampoo
to do what shampoo does.
Huh? I muttered
as I toweled off.

I fully expected
my pad to blow-up
before getting back to my desk
with coffee in hand,
or disappear
into the cracked linoleum,
but it didn't happen.
Still, there was hesitation
in my hand
as it raised
the bent&broken venetians:
holy shit,
still there,
all of it: New York City's vital signs:
the light the air the buildings the noise;
the cars, the trucks, the buses&trains,
stores open while their industrial ghouls
sucked the blood from a battered and numbed
populace; death
in all its petty permutations
perched like a peacock
preening a black plumage.

I lit a smoke
took a sip
and stared
at a very normal
and banal offering: humans
everywhere going this way
and that, locked
into their own particular dance,
clutching their cells
like ambulatory prisons,
talking, texting, sexting,
listening, surfing, imagining,
hoping, planning, measuring,
mediating something silly
or momentous
on their way
somewhere
as the sirens wailed,
and bedsprings rattled,
as first breaths
became last breaths,
and fighters ran hills
and butchers cut loins
and Korean grocers shelled
peas while I
am not dead,

but soon

will be.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014

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