WHAT TALE WILL I TELL

about that crap game
I was too long in
and whenever
I wanted to cash out,
I made a number
or found a buck
and rolled again?
What will I ask
when I get up there
and have a chance
to straighten this out--
all this confusion
all those lost opportunities
all those mulish times?
What will I ask Him?

What would you ask Him?

Don't really know...
Don't really know the good it'll do.

C'mon, what would you ask?

Well, I guess like I said:
Why'd you keep me down there so long;
why'd you keep me in the game?

What da ya think He'd say?

I don't think He'd say a goddamn thing.
I don't think He knows either.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017

WHY I'M HERE

is obviously not
what I thought.
It's not to get
my way, but to
find a way;
it's not to stroke
an inflamed
and engorged
flabby ego,
but to leash it
to reason; it's not
to get my cock sucked
with whomever however
I choose and not to offer
my arm to the blind
& crippled at crossings.
It's not to sing
praises to the Lord
or His parasites or care
if Mother Mary gives a fuck
over what I'm doing or done.
It might be to listen
to Coltrane conducting
a Latin Mass or marry
words or wonder
why the Blackbird
is hungry today?
It might be to breathe
heroin fumes off concrete
in the Bronx or rub
an amputee's stumps?
It might be
to have dinner
with Puma
& talk baseball
and loves stranded
on third?
These are all legitimate
concerns.
Certainty
is for the dispossessed
who know
they need to eat
or pee.
Those,
like myself,
who have the luxury
of play, can be artists
of cowardice--like
wondering where
all that living goes
when it stops.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2017