I'VE CRISSCROSSED

your body,
a priest
of pornography
seizing
on each
of your neuron's tits
and sucking
the pleasures
of your offering.
I've traveled a lewdness
knowing no discretion
or boundary.
Once inside,
your blue vein
of decency
I've allowed a subterfuge
of manners.
Your body's gutters
were chastened by angels;
your only accidents
were those of purity;
a river
so relentless
it reeks
from my own
stink.

How often I've memorized
your mistakes,
sifting through
your dark forest
of motives,
your illusions
of logic,
until this old bull elephant
was strung-out & stripped
of everything
except must.

And so
I must follow
it again; I must
follow the smell;
I must search out
your secrets
that light my steps
with an explorer's fever
because as you've defined my greed,
you've also defined my love:
inexhaustible.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

PAIN HAS NEVER FELT THIS GOOD

I've been trying
for years now
to get away
from her
gravitational field;
I do not have
the propulsion
necessary
or, perhaps,
I lack
the will?
No matter
why; it is
what it is.
Everything I do
or don't do
I do
or don't do
with her
in mind.
It's madness
most beatific
in a wood dark
and winding.

There has been
explorations
of different planets,
different bodies,
different climates,
different names.
I've been indifferent
to their danger if,
indeed, they presented
danger at all.
Somewhere in my core
I must have known
that her madness
would arouse and inspire
my own and give rise
to a poetry of fevers.

It is the mirror
of adolescence
that I stare into.
A demon stares back:
young, heedless,
reckless (but alive!)
Pain has never felt
this good.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015