THE YEAR CHANGES, BUT THE UNDERWEAR REMAINS THE SAME

For Puma, with love...


Men still follow
behind women
quietly
as they are led
into supermarkets,
clothing stores,
restaurants,
movie theaters,
looking aimlessly about
as they submit
to the leash,
if not the lash,
of the female
& lean
into their own
confusion.

Jesus, too,
must have noticed
the Jaws of Death
when he followed
that old whore
to her corner
and watched her
throw-out her line
& began to fish
for her daily bread.
He looked about
trying to believe
he was concentrating
on something divine
but knowing it was
rejection
that had him coming
back for more.

Too often
I find myself
reading ingredients
on the backs of cans
while the woman I'm with
moves forward
with our lives.
I've been lucky
having always someone
who knows
how to dance.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 201

2017 NEEDN'T HURRY ON MY ACCOUNT

Soon enough
I'll be shrunken
& bloodless...
or ash--
if I get lucky.
Better people than I
have made the journey.
I'm Ozymandias's
orphaned son
up to my balls
in sand: blank,
pitiless, lost
as I make my way
to the Bronx today
for a workshop
for jailbirds.

But at the stroke
of midnight
the raven will flutter
off Edgar's shoulder;
virginities will fall;
some will bleed,
others have bled,
amateurs will vomit
amid the horns, the revelers
the merry-makers; empires
will give themselves over
to shadows; girls will weep
& boys will whoop
their manhood to fathers
who are no longer there,
who followed their inner defaults:
money or fame or power.

And I'll be watching
it all play out.
I'll be with Ralph
& Alice & Norton & Trixie
in a Brooklyn tenement
in Bensonhurst.
Time does not age.
It clicks
endlessly.
Might as well
have a laugh.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

DRAGGING OUR FUTURES

through our pasts;
all the silt the dirt the mud
staining a whiteness lost
to memory
is not lost
for long:
the images the music the maybes
are on a loop
and what happens next
is filtered through
your own special
sieve--
much like the days
when you had to strain
marijuana: a clump of shit
into a strainer
and rub
leaving the stems & seeds
while the sticky leaf
fluttered to a newspaper page
on your lap.
You began to gauge the high
by how it smelled
how it looked
but didn't really know
nothing
until you lit the shit
and smoked it:
got a lung full,
held it,
nursed it,
let it out,
and waited.

2017 scares me,
but I gotta
roll it up
and wait.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016