ONE HELL OF A YEAR

Plenty of beauty
and plenty of blood.
Both were given
and granted
without
permission.
The body
sometimes moves
without knowing
why.
Such
is life; such
is the task
and the terror
lived
on a border
of disorder.
It's jazz
and jism;
it sticks
to the air;
it's in
your underwear.

I loved the beauty
and needed to be bled.
My alienist helped
cure me
by all this
exposure.
I can't say
it helped; I can say
it worked.

I began last year
in the arms of a love
and will begin this year
in the arms
of another.

(Inside
that and this
parenthesis
was only
misery
with small pockets
of pleasure).

There is
in all this
some kind
of balance.
I know
not
what
this
balance
is. But
I've seen it
through.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014