IT CATCHES YOUR GUT

like a fishhook
baited by an old
& patient angler
& deftly cuts you
and out spills
an intestine's worth
of memories; a bowel
of inane blather; a fly ball
lost in the sun.

And there you are
flopping around
on a wet deck
blood smeared & useless
save for your goddamned history:
almost rolling a 300; making it
with a heavy legged waitress
at the end
of her shift; endless nights
and endless breasts and endless beasts
that you commanded and told where to sit
& when...and now
nothing, being tricked
by the cheap lure
of loneliness
as another organ
gets pulled from you and you
can hardly even moan.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

YEATS AS PISCICULTURALIST

Autumn falls upon
wintered souls heated
from deceptive springs' child
summer. Aprils fool
is us;
in October, almost able
to see an end it is hard
to sense a beginning--though it frolics
on our soon numbed fingertips.

Liquid dreams,
seasonless wants
left aching in steel sun rays
breaking mirrors and nights warm
wetness. a woman
who's body torments me,
who's face eludes me, yet
I anxiously lower the lid
on something I wish to control,
but can't.
my second self
oozing
and fused
into tonights workshop.

I see fishermen
in dried-out streams
up to their thighs
in illusions
of being where the fish is
but isn't. they have not moved,
waiting for the fish' return,
refusing to believe that water
must preceed them.
my page is as naked
as a single word
and as painful
as a warm image
fading.
how we slide
into safetys structured pretense.
what's outside those black plaster-board walls?
(I don't care.
it's not safe.)
byzantium's daydream, inside
the razor resting bubble,
is somehow less real that still waters'
circles. we bathe in the scented oil
of fantasy in times cruel seconds hanging
on the edge of hourly panics.

Poor W.B.
looking at his limp ego
and jumping
into a one-paddle canoe
that had nothing cept leaks.
good poetry
does not make
a good woman,
eh?

Norman Savage
New York City, 1972