I COME BEARING GIFTS

I bring you all my shit
and put it in your hands:
a hundred years of shards,
a library full
of tears, laughter
the wind catches
on its breath; these
are pedestrian
I know, but they're
just the foot soldiers.
Here's Johnny Too Bad
by Taj,By the Rivers
of Babylon, by Jimmy C;
Crime & Punishment,
which we've cultivated,
& The Ivy Crown,
which we haven't.
Miles
of music subversive,
and as dangerous
as Botticelli's gold
fuck rays streaming
to the virgin's womb;
vagabond's ramblings
& scrambled eggs
in forsaken diners,
thick slabs of bacon,
coffee hot enough
to know your tongue's there.
I give you old smelly corpses
of uselessness; dreams
brokered by cruelty; a city
of maybes...

My Medea,
I come to you knowing
I must be killed...
but not yet,
baby.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

THE SONG OF THE GOAT MEN

White beards
in my bones;
swimming in a mosh pit
amidst realities entrails.
I am Nietzsche
circumcised. To Athene then
carrying blanched barbs
to a trapeze way station.
And there I balance
a dull watercolored world
of sculpture & science
with drunken rapture
saturated in music
birthing its mongrel son: poetry.

I want my madness
to possess your madness
which thrashes and pulls
the leash near snapping.
If I know
where I am I am
nowhere.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017