THERE WAS THIS GIRL

in high school
I lusted for.
It was not desire,
but need. But she
was tangled up
with a moron.
You can argue
against anything
except stupidity.

That next summer
things had changed:
her mom was fucking
a Communist neighbor
and she had abandoned Russian
for an Art major in college;
she knew what lies were
and how to create some
of her own; and I got smart
in the cosmology of drugs
and bullshit. She'd also quit
the moron and watched
how her body leaned in
to itself. Her eyes
were still cat's green.

We read Ramparts
& Ginsberg, sung Dylan
& Motown, smoked pot
& fucked whenever
& wherever we could
& survived some of the onslaught.
But not all of it;
she's dead forty-five years now
& I'm still going--not as strong
but still going. Our pain,
inviolate & absolute, created
a union having little to do
with love as we imagined love
to be, but each time I think of her
it's different--and that's
a real poem.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016

WE TRADED KISSES

and rumors,
whispers of conspiracies,
suffused the concrete
against our backs
right-angled handball courts
in our schoolyard.
They were lit
by our backdrop, graffiti neon,
mouse eared, horses
made of iron charging
full throated & adamantine, a city
gun like rainbow jello,
weeping toward a jitterbug June.
Our t-shirts
still white, our arms
barely brown our hands
creaseless
careless yet tight
around fingers walking Spanish
inside each other
and the play of shadows.

We had time
for a cigarette
but only
if we shared it.
We saved our saliva
for our mouths
when they opened
to each other
& left the cigarette
perfectly dry.
Closer,
I said.
She laughed.
C'mon,
closer.
She draped one leg
across mine.
Closer.
Her mouth
& tongue
were in
my ear.
Nicotine
slid
down
my throat.

We had cut
our ninth period
in the ninth grade;
we were seniors,
we had
all the time
in the world.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016