ONE FOR THE OL' COWBOY, GENE AUTRY

The Betty Poems

We'd not spoken
nor written
to each other
for a month,
maybe more.
I'd hung-up
on her twice
and didn't respond
to her emails--
except once
by mistake
when I hit
the wrong button.
(That happens,
I've learned,
even to the best of us).
I kept posting poems
about her--
that I did do,
--and other matters
less important
to me
but important
nevertheless.

It was hell.

But I've lived in hell
in one form or another
all my life.

But this hell
was special.

After she returned
from a week's respite
without me
where she could drink
and smoke in illusions
of her own making
(and perhaps getting close
to a body or two? who knows?
and who could blame her?)
she wrote
to me.
She'd read my poetry,
only sometimes (she was quick to note)
and wrote it had Bukowski's imprint
all over it,
with some of my own, smaller,
fingerprints, too.
(She was good
with the backhand,
real good).
I'm sure she thought
I'd be flattered,
pleased knowing what I owed
to the great poet,
but lesser man. True
for all of us
poets. But perhaps
she really knew
something else: we owe
something to everyone
who came before us
even the bad ones,
especially the bad ones.
But deep down
really deep down
she knew that anger is lit
before the match is seen
or the sulfa inhaled;
she knew I couldn't help
but respond--which
I couldn't.
Savage is Savage
and other declarations
of horseshit
lept to mind
from gut.
And she responded.
And I responded.
And she responded.
And I...

We were
"back in the saddle
again." The world
is back
on its
axis. And I
can breathe
again.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

WE FIX LOCKS

Mailbox
nothing
today.
My super nurses
his magic cup
of orange juice.
I open
and close
the box
in the same motion
shut: no money,
no letters,
no mirrors--technology
has rendered that
mute. Just a card:
We Fix Locks
cheap, 24 hours.
It no longer matters
whether it's broken
or not. Long ago,
when I knew
her time was offered
as a matter of course,
and encouragement screamed
for my father's hammer,
the tumblers set
to zero. Frozen
in a particular mathematic.
Jumping to extremes
but staying put.
Shadows of ice.
Maps
as meaningless as morning.
Nothing,
except locks
cheap, 24 hours
while my veins flow
with unarticulated fire.

Sitting,
no good;
standing, worse.
Outside
trouble;
inside
more trouble.
Worms fall
from the sky
disguised
as rain
while the wood
around me
begins to
weaken...

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

THE MUSE PLAYS, EVEN ON SUNDAY

WARREN OATES

is a madman.
There are other madmen
like him.
They all
must be asked
the right questions.

HAAGEN--
for Brasz

If there is a God
alive today
He dwells
in the land
of--DAZ.

THINKIN' 'BOUT IT

Going from black & white
Hitchcock Lifeboat Slezak yawn
to a "Yes" TV color
detergent commercial
is a very very
devastating
thing.

UPON LOOKING A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH

Teeth
full of rot.

She did, though,
have expensive tastes--

Me,
for one.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

I'VE GOT

the sad sad s,
the black twerlies,
the "everything tastes like shit"
blues. I think I'll put on
Sonny Boy
or read Hank.
I'll listen to slaves
sing and inhale
tobacco smoke
writers and follow
blind seers
and soothsayers.
And I'll drink,
yes, I'll drink
from them
and to them.
For you see
I know
what to do:
I've been black
and blue
before.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

YOU'RE AN ITCH

The Betty Poems

I can't scratch;
a constant ache
I can't rub;
a certified check
I can't cash.
You're an ATM
full of promise
and I've forgotten
my password;
you're a money machine
that's down
or not down
but in an undisclosed
location.
You hold the keys
to the handcuffs
around my soul
but have eaten them.

It's maddening.

But I'm a funny addict:
I've shot sex
for such a long time
I can only get off
when love is mainlined
as well. And it better be
pretty much pure.
And so,
I'd rather deny myself
some half-ass high
than be strung-out
on half-ass hope--never more stupid
than when it's a finger-tip away.

I give you fair warning:
if you write
and I don't answer;
if you call
and I don't pick-up
it is not because
I don't want to;
it is not that I'm trying
to test or be hurtful--
(I can be vicious, I know)
--to you; it just means
I'm busy
hiding;
I'm licking my wounds
like any animal would;
I'm filling holes;
it means I'm playing
with another madness,
I'm reading,
I'm crying, I'm laughing
as the sirens wail;
I'm eating green
bologna, liverwurst, or a bloody
steak,
or peeling an orange; I'm trying
to make it,
just make it
for a little longer.
It means that the evidence
I vigilantly gathered
overwhelms me; it means
I'm shaking my head
in disbelief;
I'm hanging on by a spider's net,
by my own flimsy reason;
it means I'm slitting
the navel
of my dream;
it doesn't mean I love you
or not; or hate you,
or not,
but accept you
I can't
yet.
All I can do
is talk about it
to strangers
or trees,
write about it and sing
songs about it
until it's dispelled,
displaced, dissipated,
broken-down and thinned
so that it flows
between my bodies plaque
gummed-up with history.

It matters little
to me the cost--
I'd rather have had it
than not
and paid
what it's worth.
And if it's lost
it's only because
it was most precious;
it's the only thing
we usually
lose...
and that's good,
too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

SHADOWS MADE FROM ASH

A moon-sized orange pumpkin
exploded in the sky,
close enough
so the force
and the heat
knocked me back
against the steel
hip-hop high school doors.
I was a counselor then,
trying to get the kids
to do what I couldn't--
not get high.
I was outside
after the first blast
made me curious enough
to find out
what was what.
The school was in the shadow
of The Brooklyn Bridge,
Manhattan side,
adjacent to One PP.
I watched the plume
of black charcoal smoke
obey the wind
and gravity
and wonder
along with my Spanish thief colleague,
some kids and other teachers,
what the hell happened?
Small aircraft,
one cop said;
some kind of internal combustion,
another blue badge muttered.
I was listening, but watching
the arc of the second
plane, making what looked
like a lazy U-turn
into the second tower.

We got the kids out,
and waited for the ones with deformities
to be picked-up and brought out without
much more trauma.
The cops
like Border Collies,
herded us up,
and funneled us North.
It was a pilgrimage
painted by Goya
during his "Black" period.
No one spoke;
no one looked at the other,
until a man shuffling beside me said,
the second tower fell.
Fell where,
I wondered.

Luckily,
I didn't live far
from the inferno.
I rounded my block
twenty-five minutes later
and saw the face
of my young Japanese wife
waiting for me downstairs
in the street
with many others.
Her face ghostly,
her fingers nervous,
to touch my face, arm,
chest, back, hair, anything
and everything
that wasn't ash
and shadow.
She'd seen many like me
imprinted into the sides of buildings
and concrete isles in her city,
Nagasaki.
For me it was merely shocking;
for her it was coded
into her DNA.
She told me
she had to donate blood
immediately and asked
to go to the nearest hospital,
St. Vincent's. I pretty much knew
it would be useless,
but didn't tell her that,
couldn't tell her that,
her eyes told me
not to tell her that,
so instead stood with her
on a line and was
never called.
There were no bodies;
they'd been vaporized.
All too human one minute,
ashes the next.
She tried again and again
for the next three days
then gave it up.
Before she'd leave our pad
she stuffed four kinds of documentation
into her bag in case she'd get merely dead,
not disappear.
If nothing else she thought
her mother should know.

The smell of wet ash,
flesh and fire and paper
and steel smoldering strong
and acrid stayed in the air
and our lungs for quite some time.
Peoples lives, those who still lived,
crumbled with the towers, too,
leaving a wide scar
across the breath of a goddamn
tough city. But no matter
how hard and tough you are
shit like that just embeds
itself and becomes your partner
silent or otherwise
and takes the space
it wants.

Forget the memorials
and forego the bullshit speeches.
Just the date is enough.
Let the ones who were not there,
who came and will come after me
be wise
to cheap sentiment.
My wife and I
survived the towers,
but our marriage couldn't survive
my self-destructive
nature; two years later
it fell, too.
We've both rebuilt
our lives without
each other
knowing it,
but our bones remain
attuned, to what
undoubtedly
is coming
our way.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

SICK KIDS

It's funny
how you find
each other
at different times
through the years
and then are glued,
without realizing it,
by certain deformities:
a blind eye,
tear-ducts
that are dried
from a careless shot
of penicillin when a child,
a bum leg, a hairlip,
a stutter,
diabetes, violent
parentage, a murmur
of the heart...
All of us found a way
to compensate:
a humor both ribald
and profane, a cleverness
outwitting death;
an alchemist's brew
to survive...and luck
in a shot glass
a syringe
or another outlet
of depravity...
Over half a century
tiptoeing or shouldering through
we thought
we knew
the terrain; once again
we were fooled because
deep down
we chose
to remain
fools. And that's alright.
Some of those friends
are famous
and some quite rich.
I am neither,
but still known
to a very small
and I'd imagine
shrinking circle.

One woman
who is well known
in literary and artistic
battlefields called
with a request:
for a few hours
over a weekend
meet her
at a hospital
that drips with cancer
and death and read
some stuff
to some of the kids
on the runway waiting
for a takeoff
that hopefully
will be aborted.
(How we still love
to be read to).
A few years back
when asked to do that,
I asked for the teenagers,
knowing next to nothing
about children.
I was given the same age,
but different faces.

The kids were either wheeled in,
or came attached to mobile I.V.'s,
hooked-up to oxygen tubes and masks,
or shuffled in and plopped down from radiation,
eyes red and vacant, bone tired
at thirteen into the first available chair or couch.
There was a constant drip-drop
dripping yellowish fluid in their arms,
or necks.
"Stop Staring At My Tits, Mister," I read first
to wake them the fuck up, by Bukowski. Some grinned,
others smiled, still others laughed
out loud. Sometimes you need permission
to laugh. To laugh at yourself
and laugh at death. Laughing fucks
with death. It makes death
crazy. Teases it with life.
I followed with a few more by Buk
and finished it with a few by Selby;
"A Little Respect," being the last.
I was a facilitator, a conductor.
I can't say for sure,
but I felt better than those kids felt
afterwards and they seemed to feel quite good.

We all went afterwards
to the famous man's restaurant
in the West Village. Attention
was paid to us--actually
to them. I knew I was an appendage
and that was O.K., too.
We talked about everything
except the kids: Cannes,
Vegas, who's fucking who,
who's old, over the hill
and demented and who's
just demented; who's a real artist
and who's a fake; who's washed-up,
strung-up strung-out hung-up hung-out
and dried--the usual shit.
But today, though,
we did not get to the uselessness
of "art." We simply
didn't need
to go there.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013