The Fight

I am like you too in that I bleed from both my heart and my mouth.

And like a handshake, I slammed The Face of Panama Al Brown into a corner at the beginning of the sixth round, and the shattering of his teeth cried Try, always try.

After the fight, they all said I was flying now into the sky, propelled by the elastic waistband around my satin shorts. The Poet was a champion. The Poet was a slingshot.

Al Brown (for now he had lost even his Panamanian title) went back to Paris, and they said like a skeleton he was turning thin and white.

And Jean Cocteau, speaking in all the dead languages of the world at once, cried
Let’s hang him on the wall!