THERE'S NOTHING VERY PRETTY

about my poetry,
or about my love.
I've learned both
through mistakes,
false starts,
& feeling
my way
through thickets
laced with
illusions
great
& small.
It's been
a nightmarish
dream
of opposites.
I've believed in
my hard-headed
notions
of what
this all meant,
& its been proved
wrong in its
soft-headed
naiveté.

My writings
are ugly,
unpolished &,
more often
than not,
gross.
They're messy
& not easily
digestible.

But when
they go
down, if
they go
down,
they are good
to eat
a thousand years.

Bon appetite.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015