ON WRITING: IN THE STRETCH

You've lived
with something
for almost
eight years.
You've loved it,
fought with it,
caressed it,
kissed it,
abandoned it...and
came back to it.
You can't leave it
because
it never left you.

You've aborted
six months of work,
a hundred and fifty pages,
once and nearly a hundred
again; you've played,
at first
with first
person,
then third,then
back to first.
You've made notes
on little scraps
of paper &
on the palm
of your hand;
you've played
in the stream
& of the stream,
you thought
a door opened
and saw it get shut
in your face.
It wanted nothing
to do with you.
It only made you
love it more.

No doubt
my love
of pain
held me
there.
I found that true
for other lovers
as well.
No doubt
there is something
to be said
for isolation
& all the pain
& pleasure
that brings.
There are those
who think
that we writers
are something
special--and we writers
would have to
agree. The truth is
that we're sonsofbitches,
cocksuckers, leeches,
and lovers of pleasures
that have nothing to do
with pleasures
of a more pedestrian
nature. We want
our cake
our fork
our slice
and our fix
and we don't
want to pay
for it in coin,
but in blood.

Now, when I can see
the end of this
I am more miserable.
It means, that soon,
I have to go
amongst you
again. Gimme
a smoke.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

BIG-BONED

and beefy,
my belly,
puffs
with pages,
distending
this monstrosity
over my belt.
I've eaten,
like a good boy,
all my words
and am now trying
to shit them out.
It's a push.
It's making
me just a little
sick; the fucker
weighs three hundred
and fifty-five pounds
as of this date
and is still
hungry.
It seems ravenous
for everything
I know
or have
done:
the pleasures,
the pains,
the betrayals
and triumphs.
It's anger
is its humor;
its aggression
is its patience.
It is a gourmand
of confusion.
It is
the iron chef
of the soul.

One cannot force
the breach;
the place
where it forms
is dark
& locked
from sight.
One must give-in
to its petulance
and not encourage
its reticence.

I love it
already.

(And, yes,
you're in there,
too).

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

PERFECT

to think you lying
on some Brazilian beach
fucking a young man
in the heat,
his dick as engorged
as a donkey's,
while Tanto Tempo
plays in the background
while here,
my tortoise shelled
appendage shrivels further
inside me with every
breeze that blows
the Siberian air
under and through
my armor and plunges
the zero in my bone
down into Hell.

I watch your toes
curl in the sand
to a samba moon
& listen
to all the ways
you say, "Daddy"
to those sons
who struggle
to understand.
I will tell you
that pleasures
will be denied
outside my presence,
but my presence
will be in every absence
you will sense
in every face
not mine,
in every voice
not familiar
and in every corner
turned with
expectation &
disappointment.
Each kiss
a confirmation
of dryness;
each thrust,
a rebuke
of motive.

I'm branded
into your hide
as if you were a cow
who could only give
your milk
to one farmer;
I'm in those secret
places which punishes
language. But
do not despair,
mi amore
for I speak
in many tongues,
too.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

A HIATUS

For B.L. mainly

I'm going to try and take a little break from posting in order to finish the novel I'm working on. I'm close, but need to take the energy I use for this, and put it into that. And while it's true that the poem and the novel are one, still, I find that working on one can water down the other. I would think that three to six months sounds about right.

I'm going to leave you with a quote by a friend, Jamieson, and her husband, Simon.

"To love is to give what one does not have and to receive that over which one has no power. To love is to freely negate the stubbornness that is the self and to live in loyalty to an affirmation that can dissolve like morning mist with the first experience of betrayal."
--Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster--
"Stay, Illusion"

PEEPING

the peeper
who peeps
the peeper
who peeps.

Fear not,
my love.
If I do not love
you, I do not love
at all and when
you stop
for a minute
or stop
at your grave
I will not
be loved
again.

Can you see me
getting dressed?
I'm going out
this midnight.
In this cold
February
of grief.
There is a ball
for exhibitionists.
My fingers
are all
I need
to warm
me--
though
your eyes
are essential
for this dance
to be danced, too.
Observe me
observing you
in your private
hell of dancing
lies, dancing
that delicious
Fascist rag.

Its perversion
is its passion.
Nothing more
than being
scared
shitless--
the beginning
of lust.

And isn't that
beautiful, too?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015

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

LI NA & DENNIS

I saw
Li Na
& Dennis
on TV
the other night;
she's beautiful,
and tough,
and terribly
skilled.
He's heavy,
not very handsome,
but seems wise
beyond his years.
They both
have been
through love's
fires
and have come
out
the other side.

It made
this white Western man
very very
jealous.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2015