TICKLE THOSE 88's

Happy Birthday, Toni.
And thank you.
Thank you
for locating
my heart,
corroded as it was
(& is),
& pumped it back to life
at moments that I thought
it was failing.
You've done it
& are doing it
for fifty years.

Have as grand a time
as I am having
cracking open
your newest work.
Much love, baby,
N.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

MILES OF MILES

He'd be 89 today.
I'm still surprised
he's dead--I thought
he was too mean
to allow death
to enter
his world.
KCR has
a marathon
happening:
every blow
into his horn
recorded, is aired.
To tell you the truth,
it's a bit much
to digest
in one sitting
like hanging
all the Picasso's
in one room;
Dostoyevsky read
in one sitting.
Still,
it's a grand gesture,
a bow
to renegade genes
of iconoclastic fury.

Please,
don't touch
that dial.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

ON MY BIRTHDAY; THIS YEAR

"Survival is triumph enough."
Harry Crews

Whew!
I don't remember
how I got here!
so fast!
with fiction
behind me
I speed
toward the slowest
of conditions.

I'm the only one
that holds the pen.
so much power!, that
on Jane Street I ripped-up a dream
and neatly disposed it
in a trash can where it still
lies, smeared
yet legible.
it surprises even me
this want
for a strange warm pool
where water has the consistency
of evaporation.

in this myarid of highways
there is really only one
that gets traveled
and so many rules
are translated into one--
survival,
for as long as necessary
or possible.

Norman Savage
Coney Island, 1971