INSIDE THESE FENCES

Good fences,
a flinty New Englander
once wrote,
makes good neighbors.
And I've constructed
millions of them.
I've tried to keep out
the many bad
and dangerous sides
of my mind
that assault
from places known
and hidden;
that spreads its poisons
secretly
or trumpets its disdain;
the side that believes
that love is finite,
that kindness
is for faggots
or mothers,
that bleeding
reveals flags,
that color is destiny,
that poems are limp-wristed,
and that my heart is really really
pure
and beyond reproach.
But somehow the pebbles
or stones
or boulders
get moved
and all my time is spent
shoring up
a more porous
container.
It's taken me
almost a lifetime
to learn
a most basic truth:
we can never know
the other
unless
we allow them
to sit at our table
and discuss mysteries
both big
& small,
until the stones
are rubbed
smooth
of its
edges.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2019

WHEN YOU'RE DEAD

you're dead,
they say.
What do you care
what happens
next?
Probably,
they're right.
But
still...

Hart Island, Potters Field,
looms large...
a storied history
of paupers perhaps,
but it creeps me
the fuck out
lying in a trench
with 150 strangers:
naked bones, hearts
with cupid arrows I
don't know...intestines,
smells, colons, empty
skulls & differing
opinions.

If, by chance,
you've been breathing
on my words
for whatever reason
and you don't see me
for three months let's say,
knock,
or call,
or get in touch
with my nutty brother (maybe
he's still alive?),
just get me
out of the ditch,
burn me up,
scatter me,
preferably
anywhere
where I won't
be seen.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2016