The Boxer

These bony white knuckles bloody themselves on grey metal doors, forged and stuck down in basements where we go to name ourselves, punch dirt and sand with red claws so fierce they'll snap your jaw. Our crystallized and opalescent teeth wrap around the curb like sticky chewed gum. This sharp metallic severance, dear irreverence, felt on your wet gums.

Poetry is so cheap all of a sudden. Written on pay-per-view scrolls and chipped on mugs. Sold by the word, by the plagiarism. Does that mean anything to you anymore. Can't you feel without being felt? Is the only good poetry left in these here fists? 

Tattered silk lanterns fallen in the corner, ungodly yellow light emitting from the joint of ceiling and wall. Ropes of emerald, long and lean, victors longing to be seen, come clean into the night amidst sky scrapers of vented metal and ripped and tattered posters of yesterday. 

This shit will never be safe for families. No family is ever safe from this toxic society this kill or be killed world, this loveless, lasting, enduring life from which we feign ignorant bliss until it chokes us like sweet woven sugar, turquoise and mint, like an 80s pinball machine where my head cracks off each colored bauble with loud jeers and bells that ring in the dense fog, I cannot see myself, I cannot know myself, but I hear the bells and know that the dead have not overcome just yet.

blame me, oh just maim me, it's all the same to me.

Wicked children who traipse over mirthful land still not violated by condescending trash, kids with plastic water guns, fluorescent and crackable, hot pink smoke bombs, Hawaiian shirts tsunamis and wind leave my anger alone.

say it was a mistake.

Unbloomed roses and bubblegum cigarettes. Real cigars, their smoke masks their faces as they throw down their cold, putrefied, petrified cash. Buy me, sell me, quell this swell spell in me with a lemon yellow barbell bombshell trapped in this cartel hell down the stairwell to the motel graceful like a gazelle too far gone from a Rockwell, life feels like carousel, oh god I'm going to throw up sound the damn alarm bell. 

They can't know how much I beg and plead and bleed for the extraordinary, they cannot possibly fathom how i scrape my knees on that floor, praying for a shoulder to lean on.

who deserves mercy? the pitiful? the pitiless? this unreputable, sophomoric sanction of humanity who screams the loudest and is heard rather incoherently, so all that gets it out is what we want to hear, not what we need to hear.

let me go.

Dig out these briers stuck to my heels. Chip out these thorns smartly stuck under my crown. Cuts in my abdomen. Slits from my nose. Sting Sting Sting. Right on my bone, my cheekbone. I smile my skeleton grin, gums are violet, chin is mauve. I fall upon my elbow, purple mountains majesty, already turning fruited plains gold around the edges. 

Float Float Float. Get back up and dance, dance like a child around a maypole. Dance like a queen at coronation. Dance around a fire and scream your chant, invoke your spirits out from under your cracked ribs. 

Kiss your palms and gift them across their faces. Claw your way out from this hell. 

Punch, Kick, Jump, Dive, Live. 

Live. 

Live until the bell tolls and the count climbs towards 10. 

Nine. 

Ten.