Life of Savage

I’ve been excited about him as an individual.

I’ve met him as a person, emerging from his own shadow.

Indeed it is remarkable.

Indeed it is to be remarked of my friend Savage that

the desolation of hopes not merely deferred

but by impracticability brutalized

little marred his genial spirit.

How such a one, so circumstanced by parentage—

the mother crippled by disappointment; the father by rotgut and Percodan—

as to blight his prospects, and blacken with untimely frost the buds

of those ambitions justly excited

by manifest powers, graces, and propensities,

should nonetheless display

discrimination not inferior to those we deem wise,

sympathy judicious and above reproach,

is cause for a wonder neither cynicism can besmirch nor incredulity subvert.

In and out of juvie, jacking cars at fifteen,

snorting lines of Adderall, his nostrils stained blue,

kicked out, taken back, kicked out,

busted, paroled, busted again,

straining to reach the shiny object fallen through the grate,

tantalizing, just beyond his fingers,

finding and losing God,

thinking as he rakes the leaves of the linden tree

outside the sublet bungalow

that eating, sleeping, dying are what it’s all about,

nothing else, maybe a few sunsets,

forget about sex.