MILES OF MEMORY

pinstripes and polkadots
and swagger; a voice
sounding like his balls
are in his throat; full of gravel
and Joe Louis and, of course,
his horn
muted
by a love,
his love,
our love
of darkness. we wait
as peanut shells crunch
beneath 3 a.m. highballs
in the 9th circle
informing us
of style: the answer
to everything:
how to dress
who to listen to
or talk about.
our heads surreptitiously twisted
each time the wind
rushed in a body
not his
we casually turned back
to the conversation...
or shot glass... or chick
we were trying to make
while evenings danced
and everyone was young,
and brilliant,
and affected
with drama; our loves
dangerously alive
or thick with death
like wet ash;
music framing each intent
with motive, quixotic
and sublime in it’s queer logic
informing gamble
not yet oil slicked with living
too hard or recklessly. our precipice,
our wit. those who could not solo
got out of the game early; those whose ideas
came from books
were delivered
to same; never getting laid
they hunkered back
to Brooklyn or Jersey or Queens
to await marriage...perhaps dentistry,
perhaps both.

Those nights we passed,
how full
and empty they seem now
stuck in the mind
like gnarled venetian blinds;
yet they emit light
of a certain kind,
one that is informed
by pleasure.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 1999

MY CHOPPERS

are negotiating
with what remains
of my mouth: chew this
slowly, you fool; too sticky,
idiot; asshole,
that side no longer exists.....and so on.
Sugar has eaten parts of me whole.
The ride of word passion bloodied sanity.
I’ve fucked with the odds; they have rendered me
a chalk horse, scratch, even money
to be turned into glue
anytime soon.

This coat hanger of flesh is closer to seventy
than fifty: half a foot of intricate plumbing
and rewiring on my pump, a mouth
full of rot, fingers fattened, gnarled and bent,
eyes blurred with cataracts thick
with sugar, liquor, and dope hued saturation.

I’ve had a long continuous fist-fight
with death. People were merely pre-lims.
Usually outclassed and not very interesting.
I’ve stuck words
up deaths’ ass more than once.
He was with every woman I’ve ever slept with;
he was between the sheets of every institution
I fell asleep in; every tooth that was pulled
he yanked on; every drunk I’ve ever been on
he found money for; all the senseless mornings
of going to be fired from a job
I didn’t want anyway, he waited,
at a gin mill or dope spot
to put my rage into my fist,
or vein. A wise and patient man
death is. He’ll have to be.
I’ll fool with him some more.
Death hates Life.
Words are Life. They leap around
like ballerinas in the brain. They make fun
of teeth, and hearts, and pricks, and cunts and balls, and beerbellys,
crooked fingers and phantom limbs; they laugh
at the silly ravings and meanderings of ants;
they are the final hedge against inflation or devaluation
of the soul; they are the salt edged tit;
they provide power
as the game works
on.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2000

CALL IT GUTS

the way the body works
through fear
turning towards the edge
of your Procrustean climax
and allowing your feet
to fall
over the side
dangling
head bowed;
milky cataract eyes
sifting through the bones,
(the geometry of dreams),
(the cross and the drummer;
the hiked skirt; a riff
of wonder; pools slick
with scag oils)
palms flat,
fingers smoothing creases,
elbows locked, (the back, however,
is humped, curved, a loose
contingent of ganglion,
nervous tissue, vertebrae
shocked, shorn, subverted
from it’s makers intention),
a push, a rise
with little fluidity; but purpose
catches hold: You fuck,
I will bend you today;
I will carve my name
into the sides of days
into the teeth of beggers
into the cocks of grayhounds,
and cunts of fire;
I will piss my dreams
into the toilet of life
and get on with it.

The only affirmation I need
is the one I got up with:
You’re up you bastard,
whatareyagonnado?
to serve
a power
you know
nothing of.


Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 1998

RECONNECTIONS, CIRCUMVENTIONS, CUT & PASTE

There’s a scar running
from my right ankle to my right testicle
where my right vein used to be; it must have been a long one.
The surgeons lifted it during the quadruple; they also heisted
a mammary vein, which you can’t see, and reconnected my heart
to keep the pump pumping.
There have been other physical alterations: teeth yanked,
gums opened and scraped to the bone; fingers crooked and bent
from sugar blues and four black gangerous toes pulled and flushed
down a toilet and into the sea for fish to eat.
There was a delicious agony in all that
like a love affair
gone bad,
repeatedly.
Yet this was better: freshly laundered sheets
for your asshole to sweat through; Gods vein of mercy,
morphine, to fondle the few remaining body parts left, and ease
the imaginative stew to percolate and simmer. You are leaving
the world in small quantities, and what’s left
is less functional,
less dangerous,
less important,
but no less real...
for you that is.

Kat, my wife, came near
to see what was up
with the writing.
Very depressing, I said.
At least you’re able to get it out, she said.
Not really, I said, but I’d rather be banging the typer
than taking this shit out on you.
Good idea, she said, I’m feeling blue, too, baby...and I might
be able to kill you, especially after you put my tit through this ringer, and,
in the shape you’re in, that shouldn’t be too hard...size
is no big deal, know what I mean?
Yeah, indeed I do, I said, and lifted her shirt.
Her auburn nipple was as close as pleasure dared to come
these days, and I simply put my mouth around her dark brown pinkish wonderful aureole and nursed.
She murmured slightly.
Baby, she said, Seinfeld is on at 9.
Huh, I said, I thought the murmuring was for me.
Just thinking, she said,
don’t take it personally.
No, I said,
of course not.

There is really only one way to end this day...or poem
for that matter...quietly,
very very quietly.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 1996

WITHOUT DANGER

There is something to be said about dying early
with some teeth left in your head, heart,
maybe soul.
Before the style, the risks,
and the ventriloquist,
who shucked pain like so many vibrant husks,
sheds you, too. Memories are saccharine; letters,
humbled by twenty years, are yellowed signposts
of genital decay, signaling fear...and worse:
obedience.
Without bluff, without balls, without danger
is defeat.
Boring, moronic, mind-numbing
day to day capitulation to instinct leashed
like a trained seal waiting
to get fed.

ARF, ARF, ARF.



Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 1997

THE DAYS RUN FASTER THAN THE WAILING WIND

This terrifies me: the sunflower
as geometry; wind twisting inside my skull, a mad orphan
of light; oceans salt thick and ugly; young children
praying; the dry lick
of evenings; walking
on the wrong side; pellets of fear,
like mouse droppings, ricocheting
off gut walls; the cat approaching
forgiveness; mouth cotton numb;
speech that punishes silence;
sticks with flesh and ashen hues;
rides into a moonlight shot
with blood yoke and song;
river moss and mud and marsh
and mules that cannot go another step,
slag heaped and sullen in a winter sun;
honesty among intimates; innocent scavengers
picking at the end of my days and ways;

and where will I go
when this living stops?

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 1998

A CHRISTMAS GREETING TO MY FELLOW HUMANS

There are those
who always seem
to be happy; never knowing
accidents of any kind.
They have been winners
at genetic roulette, and
hardly ate a bone cooked
more than once. Usually
they smile, if not laugh
at the postman’s legs,
on the street, in supermarkets
only if in the company of others.
Perhaps they were prepared well
for life’s catastrophes, or have a faith
that transcends them. I’ve never seen them
in clinics, in gin
or Medicaid mills,
foraging for food
thrown out, for money disappeared
from a hole in the pocket
or head; stolen
without warning
or retribution.
Usually these aren’t the ones whose bodies are at war
against themselves: acne, tumors, diverticulitis,
dementia, boils, warts, madness; their lives aren’t waged
against landlords, and bosses, and politicians
who possess the trait that all men of power do: indifference.

I’ve not drank, nor written a poem, in ten years.
I’ve not been missed. The word has mattered
to those that own the presses. Tribal chiefs
and The Medicis have understood this well. Those writing
control only their demons; they only matter
if lucky, as commodity.

I’ve just come from the supermarket. I do not need
a basket. They watch me, as I watch them.
I saw a couple holding hands as they debated
salsa: too hot for him, too mild for her.
He whispered something in her ear, and they laughed.
She leaned in closer, and rested her head
on his shoulder. I moved
on.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 1995