A boxer’s fury must be cultivated, surely,
but the best ones are fed the same way
as silent calves enclosed in iron pens:
the grain funneled by force, a practice
perfected by centuries of risk vs. reward
and, always, money. Through this process—
capricious but productive, with perfect specimens
churned out like the livestock they are—choking
as they must on what they’re made to swallow,
a fuel for precision and a finite time to thrive
before an abrupt and brutal abrogation—the only
merciful thing they’ll ever experience—any fighter’s
endgame in reverse: an ever-after orgy for those senses
deprived for so long, all in service to a science
that starts sweetly than sours, ostensibly overnight.
Broken down and no longer especially useful,
bruised fists soaking in filthy ice, scarred eyes surveying
the opposite corner of an empty ring, they’re put out
to pasture but not out of their misery: they endure,
bodies imploding and fury boiling like a red cape,
a recipe or reason for choler that can no longer be quelled—
if they ever were—the taste for blood bred early, now
instinctual, and fighting (others, oneself) the only thing
a warrior can do. Only now one’s wrath isn’t measured
in three-minute increments; can never be sated with
sex or booze, feasts or pills, life itself a split decision.
Alone (again or at last) in a widening field,
this bull raging in a new arena, the fix in
and the only currency is everything he’s had
beaten into him, every ticking second a mockery
and reminder: you may the Boss for a minute but
another boss made this world before it made you.
—
