ALL ABOARD

Memory is a motherfucker;
It can't be trusted.
Especially your memory.
Your memory was always
suspect. You know it
and I know it.
Still,
we get on board.
You never know,
do you,
where it's going
or how
it's gonna get there?
It always surprises you--
thinking you're taking the express
& discovering, after the doors close,
it's running on local tracks.
And it ain't being sung
by Curtis Mayfield or Al Green
or The Persuasions; in fact,
nothing's being sung
yet everything is heard
in this melodic atonal cacophony
above the grinding of the wheels.
It's an unreliable train
ferrying an unreliable narrator
whose perfect sense
is unimpeachable.
All those stops
stopped at
and stopped up
and stopped still:
I look for Milk Tit Avenue, but round
Daddy's Bend; try to lower my eyes at
Agony Way; try a detour to Women's Wonder Wheel,
but fall into Judy's Triangle;
jump off Heroin Cliff; get back at Hope Lookout,
and avoid Church Street completely
except in fact while Masturbation Circle
appears again and again but less and less
as the brakes grind down.

Luck
has played a part,
and an absent minded conductor
has not yet punched
my ticket.
Your trip, of course,
is different.
And the seat
next to me
is always
empty.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015