Bare Knuckle Fighter

 - funny in a sense,
my being drunk, his being drunker.
I sat on his knotted carpet,
listening to that recording of his song,
..at the turnstile...It's okay...it's okay
yet I never expected him to enter.

Medallion man, soft as an eiderdown,
bare-knuckle fighter, commander;
he fumbled his way into the room,
reading the aertex walls like Braille.

I clasped him.
Dry-wretched tears wrecked his body
but didn't move him,
a man stoic as granite death.
He told how that decade's violence
taught him to fight young.

Back home 
he was their 'desperado',
hero of their drunken moments,
mythologized in the urban folklore
men told over their dreary pints.

But here,
I could see why his beautiful fists
seized into fists,
his speech into 'f**k yous'
why he was, so often, their firebrand.

It wasn't being deserted in a foreign land,
(that, he could easily survive)
but a marrow-deep distrust
of humanity that ached in him right then,

but deeper still, some loneliness,
nurtured in the interludes of fights
in his broken home's charged silence
'because there was no other option'.

'It wasn't being deserted then,
but being deserted always'