Mike Tyson Inside

Fee-fi-fo-fum–Cassius Clay here I come…
from this dark and solitary place
where no means yes, Mike, give it to me
in the garden of your heart pretty flowers
pansies white blue violet fuchsia black gold
droop like they’ve been beaten by heavy rain.
Clay beat Liston and Vietnam and bloomed
to float like a butterfly in the Thrilla in Manila.
I was his heir apparent, wayward manchild
in the promised land. Cus died, taking into
earth a piece of my heart.
I was brute bulk and adrenaline, an inside-
animal. Can’t no one touch me except her
and her mother’s looming shadow in our home.
Robin was a dream with claws. On our
designer couch I drank
my liquor neat and reached for Cus. The Prince
of Nothing helped me up before the ten
count. Shouldering chaos, behind the wheel
of my BMW I headed straight for the heart
of a Catskill oak. Even a brute sees stars
some dark night. Pulled from the wreckage I
floated through a dream arcade holding no one’s
hand. In the Tokyo Dome
Buster Douglas, nobody really, proved even a
nobody could be somebody one fleeting hour.
The heir to Muhammad Ali down, not defeated.
The next logical step: a correspondence course
for my GED, then a televised chat
where I sank into the luxury of that couch,
my arm ’round dream Robin in that mansion
her mother’s shadow loomed. Fee-fi-fo-
fum, here I come all you Ebony lovelies.
Don’t say goodnight at 5 A.M. No means yes

I’m bad, that’s good. “Come back to Indiana,
Stranger, but not too late.” My Italian suit
swapped for jailhouse denims, there’s
no hand qualified to carry my jockstrap. Fight?
I’ll fight the lowliest guard, the pale fairy
warden, for free get inside pump the uppercut
puffing belligerent me. What I was made for.
Sitting in the stir in the dark I crack my knuckles.
Anyone home upstairs? an inner voice whispers.
On the edge of a cot I sit and mind-rise to glass
as expensive as Don King’s bathroom mirrors.
There in the garden of my hard heart pansies
petals gold white fuchsia purple midnight blue
bloom and boom–bruised by the heavy rains’
deadly left hook.

Shreveport Phone Booth

1.

Consider the bullet hole in this astrological sign:
Gary is your name.
You’re six years old.
A rubber band links your paddle and ball.
The red ball bounces off the paddle,
Then snaps back. An older boy appears.
He leads you off a ways,
into spruces. In their shadows
you see a tree fort.
There are big kids around here
looking to hurt little boys.
You don’t see the blade he thrusts
into your chest, again and again.
“Why did you kill me?”
“I wanted to know what it felt like to kill.”
He wipes the knife on your shirt,
turns, and swaggers off.

2.

Forty years later, a packed courtroom,
you look into his eyes.
What to say or not say? What to do?
Throw acid in Lester Berman’s face.
Then, behind bars, when he looked in the mirror
he’d see the lives he scarred.
Instead, you don’t go to the courthouse.
At home, you smoke a cigarette,
walk your dog, continue living.
Lester Berman, a name you didn’t know
until you read it yesterday in the morning news.

3.

Years ago: I’m watching TV,
nightly news and weather.
As deputies lead a prisoner
through an airport corridor,
someone appears from a phone booth,
puts a pistol to the prisoner’s head
and pulls the trigger.
In the scuffle the shooter goes down,
the pistol wrenched away by a deputy.
What if I were the man in the phone booth ?
I pick up the paddle and ball from the grass.
The spruces throw off shade.

4.

I was talking to someone in the weight room.
His dog had been killed by a neighbor boy.
“I’d make him sorry,” I said. “I would hurt him.”
I thought of striking with speed, strength, certainty.
But with what–a gun, a blade, a bat?
You want to take a thug’s head
and smash it against a concrete wall, but instead
you see trauma to the brain, blurred vision
that never goes away.
Light glints off the cuffs on the prisoner’s wrists.
Flanked by deputies, he shuffles
down the airport corridor. Someone comes out
of a booth, pistol raised,
turbulent and shadow-quick on the evening news.

Tweakers

No money to pay my phone bill or buy food,
I used it to pay the fines and bail
of a man who didn’t love me.
He kicked me in the face,
bruised my arms, dislocated my shoulder.
But it wasn’t all bad,
sometimes it was really good.

But he cheated on me with another woman
and kicked his dog.
He broke into houses and stole things:
a laptop, a generator, pool cues, ball caps.
His dog shit on the floor, and I cleaned it up.

Texting while driving,
Hey Deb, I found the struts for my truck. Is your daugter
and her girl still there? Fucking better not be
when..he hit a car head on.

One morning we got high.
At John Deere, my work, I set a table on fire.

My God, what have I done? I look in the mirror
and pray he loves me.