ROMANCE

To spend Christmas Eve
at Nathan's
in Coney Island
eating a hot dog,
while the rain
whips up mischief
& magic
is about as romantic
as it gets.

It will be an empty
shelter for a few
figures huddled
in an embrace
of whispers,
mustard biting
their lips, ketchup
staining their french fried fingers.

A clatter
of trains
at the end
of their lines
huffing
into terminals
as useless as prayers
offered up to love
proffered for the sea
slapping against the darkness
a few steps from civilization.

I will have worked
a half day, trying
to unlock the gates
swinging against the souls
smashed against odds
they inherited. I've come
from the same asylum
and wrap myself in our disease.

Another frank? I ask.
My hands grip a bill
& I fish it out.
We are a long way from heaven,
but a very long way from hell.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

RUNNING ON EMPTY

For A...
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Chances are
if you're reading this
you've eaten today,
or will tonight;
you have a roof
over your head;
you can fuck
or be fucked
by someone
of your own
choosing;
you can,
at least,
have a hand
to hold;
you have ways
to go.
Most of those
who I'm supposed to counsel,
who I'm supposed to know
more about living than they do,
have had none of this
and even the hobo bed
they sleep in
tonight
will be fraught
with an evanescent
darkness.
Some wait
for me
to arrive
in the morning,
believing
I have answers or,
at least,
another way
to go,
to get them through
another day;
addicts,
myself included,
have always been
magical thinkers.

But today,
I'm fresh out
of words,
worn thin
from my own
battles
with my own
demons
who keep finding
my new cracks
in old cracks
to slither & slide
through and take possession
of flimsy pretensions.

I would think
it would change:
I'm older;
seemingly
at peace
with this carnival
of Hell that excited me so.
But I'd be wrong
to think that.
I could find fault
with Heaven
not being Heavenly enough.

But tomorrow
I'll go to Chinatown
with a woman
who likes spice.
She knew Arbus
and listened
to Ornette.
She'll sleep over
& leave when I leave
for work Sunday morning.
I'll play Nico for her
& she'll know that too.
Good things
are sometimes
hard to take,
but I'll live.
Yes,
I will.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

SINGING WHILE STOKING THE FIRES

wood, coal,
flesh to flesh
heating sparks
crackling
smoke upward,
lathering up
bodies pumping
against each
other's proximity
rubbing inside
furnaces shoveled
by thick-armed
blacksmith's
& ravens & broken wings.
Without contact
frozen, left to freeze
in bone's zero.

There must
be "musts."
There must
be love's oil
to lub
ri
cate
the workings.
Without that
there is the nothing
there was
& the nothing
that is
and the nothing
that awaits
all who yawn
& lift their sorry spirits
to the nothing
up above.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2014