BETWEEN THE BRIDGES

"The only real defense civilized man has against anybody who bothers him is to lie."
"The Death Ship"
--B. Traven--

1.

I sat
lost;
excitement & dread
at each elbow;
yet each elbow seemed
to be welded together
without a joint; they bled
into each other.
It was like dying.
"New" was a precipice
I didn't like to walk.
It baffled me.
Others embraced change;
I cringed. Birth
was the riskiest thing I've done,
and if I had a choice, well...
And so, in a strange,
but painless agony
trying to suppress,
or protect, or eviscerate
the possible
from impossible, trying
to tease out where
I stopped
& life began
I slumped,
whole forests
on my shoulders,
in my seat
scuppered.

One bridge was a vapor
of dreams pouring a magnificence
born from concrete & steel
into the furnace of amalgamation;
the other workaday, down-to-earth,
but far from soulless were so close
they breathed on each other,
one with a practiced brutishness,
the other with a finery
of a politician's promise
and a puta's lures.

But I had weapons: I'd been born
into a Coney Island of near ghosts:
Steeple Chase's clown of con
& a grilled Nathan's frankfurter's pop.
Juices escaped. They trickled
down my mouth, sometimes draining
the sorrows stacked like taxed aircraft
beneath the head & heart, already old
for its years, seeing mostly
a wrenching finality.
I was drawn
(and quartered) while waiting
for a bell to move me along
into my next class of ambivalence.
It was the salted air
& fresh fry fish paean
in the seagull's beak
of Hopkin's God's minions
I sought to seek
that had me lumbering
toward Stillwell Ave--
the end, hence beginning
of the 20th Century Ltd;
a circadian cancer
and cure.

Past the window sills
spilling over with the flabby flesh
of old Italian grandmothers
wedded to the smell of red gravy
now on their outpost of death watch;
unfiltered & silent they stare
into every stranger's face while
illness, cradled by the wind,
snakes along the beach & up
through a rotten boardwalk's slats
until it boards the iron horses
at lands end; the terminal
is the beginning
of the edge where a sordid funhouse
insideously injects intent
without content, a needful ripening
of cataracts plump enough
to finally pluck.
I was ready, you see,
I was ready to be graced
by ladies of taste; and
I was ready
to be tasted
by as many as I could tastefully
work my way through
with wit, a dash of innocence,
a pouting lip, an inquisitive brow.
With each stop
I revised the script: Brando
on Kings Highway, Bogart
on Ave. U; Clift
if I thought Liz awaited,
Burton if she was late.
I had time for creation;
for even this ride
I was creating the ghost
of what I would become
and all the things I wasn't
the stop before
I'd make perfect
before the grinding of gears;
I had enough time
to make perfect
the imperfections
in fact, more
than enough
salt & sand
to sit back
and drift,
from what is
to where
one isn't
and where one isn't is,
as it always has been,
on an island
cannibalized by love,
is that island, and
that island
is called love.

2.

Just outside the gummed floor
& grime laced windows of the D train
walks Walt Whitman and his children,
hanging from his soft graybeard while
the green sap of literature,
runny with possibility,
turns a blueish white,
like veins do when age
raises the trestles;
often times you're tricked
by sight, thinking you see
where they go when they go
to tease and excite
your Helter-Skelter neurons
climbing to the top
of the slide
& grease it
wanting to taste the speed,
wanting to see just how fast
the ride could be when the locks
are unscrewed from the jambs when
even the jambs themselves are removed
from the doors...

If anything, I thought Allen himself
would be waiting for me
because he alone would know
how beautiful I was.
How human suffering
is not very different
than the horse being whipped,
or the bug being crushed.
How well Fyodor understood this
from his perch underneath
the floorboards as the merry-go-round horses
felt the lash, & wild-eyed,
took off to go round again.

3.

Our eyes
have become
sad lanterns
too capable,
still, at reading,
& inept, still,
at understanding.
Let us go, though,
on a journey most often
denied by a savage intellect
& weaned despite intent
or purpose.

Each year
a new
drowning;
each drowning
a fulfillment
of a scribe's logic:
inquisitiveness
requires courage,
and courage
is not
for the faint
of heart.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020

A HOSPITAL HOLDS

Not only my bones
But also my spirit.
It actually argues
For my life
When the world
Wants to kick me
Out. I never thought
I could become so attached
To something so impersonal
But I have. The little more
I've become besides
Blood pressure & bowel movement's,
Blood sugars & restrictions,
Holds me & loves me
As close to humanity's breast
That life allows.
And while I admit
It's nowhere near
What I've always wished
To drown in, it will do--
It has to.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2020