THE NIGHTMARE RIDES THE RAILS

The sunset is cold.
Evenings are cruel
reminders of mercies
once tendered by stick-up men
now behind the cage
mortgaged by age & small print.

I carry my limbs
like remembrances,
thick logs held as offerings
to burn in my night's furnace.
This is not penance.
This is an old Wurlitzer
in a 42nd Street dive.
This is speed rack Scotch.

She spread herself.
And I did the same.

I'm attracted
to the way poppies ooze.
How, when they're sliced
the jism slides
down their face.
It was a wise culture
who saw their mouths
around the bulbs easing
the cuts of a failing
light.

How women know
how to touch
the way they do
sits at the crossroads
of silence
& mercy.
Adam's curse,
revisited
nightly, plays
across her lips.
Her tongue licks
a wound deeper
than the world.

I would wake,
if I could,
to a life
like mine.
I would shake
my oily fur,
matted & soiled
from a mongrel's
impetuousness,
& find
my ear
in your
mouth
& your whispers
on my breath.

Let me love you,
it said,
and I awoke
looking
for the voice
& a gun.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

CAITLYN'S OUT--

everybody's in:
feminists fetishizing
feminism; photoshop's
hustlers pimping
& primping & cropping;
reality suffering
mass delusions & madness
surfacing with each
"like" & "post"
& "tweet" & tit
distended.

How lovely
to be romanced
by romance
again. Nature knows
better than all
the asshole
philosophers, pundits
of all things social,
like diseases
& plagues & performance
anxiety: all men want
is to see
under the hood. They want
to know:
how she drives?
How she corners?
How she excels
when the foot
is put to her
and pressed hard
around her neck?
They care not one wit
for reality--
and who can blame them--
when illusion
is the gas
that makes them
go.

It's Eve
who graces
the cover.
You can almost
touch her. Come
closer.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015