Fight

The next day, I was walking along the city’s pretty avenue
when I spied, right there, carefully, in the middle of the road,
two men going toe-to-toe: they were fighting to the real death.
It was very bloody and my eyes bled, also, to see such violence.

The taller of the two men was surely in his early young twenties.
He was pale and strapping, and wore a muscle tee and NY cap.
He was of the race dudebro, and his forearms and biceps shone
with sweat in the Sun as he punched and parried in the brawl.

The shorter of the two men was easily about 5 or 6 years old.
He was just under four feet tall, and his red hair and freckled cheeks
shimmered in the light as he ducked and lunged and growled, spit
flying from his lips as he took and gave vicious punches and kicks.

The taller man landed a boot in the shorter man’s chest, sending
him sprawling backwards into a post office drop box at the corner.
The shorter man screamed, clutched his chest, then rallied, rolling
to the side and firing a balled fist up into the groin of the taller one.

The twenty-three-year-old wheezed and his eyes bulged so hard
it seemed like they were about to snap right off the stalks. Still,
he managed to catch and hold the six-year-old’s head in his hands
in the tight scuffle, and he pressed his thumbs down into the eyes.

The six-year-old, in return, cried and grabbed the older one’s nipple
and twisted it clean off, getting blood all over the both of them.
Their battle kicked up a lot of dust and trash in the street, and soon
they were surrounded by a swirling brown cloud and invisible to me.

As I watched this go on, I noticed that my Coca-Cola tasted funny.
It tasted like the girl working at the soda fountain failed to make sure
there was enough syrup to make the soda right. I winced in irritation.
How annoying that I was going to have to run all the way back there.

 

Poet Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, Drunk Monkeys, Soft Cartel, Menacing Hedge, Cultural Weekly and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Philosophical Idiot, MoonPark Review, Manzano Mountain Review, Broadkill Review, antinarrative journal and Street Poet Review. For more, check out richboucher.bandcamp.com. He loves his life with his love Leann.

Photographer Steve Warren is a veteran, recovering addict and peer specialist who became a self taught Naturalpathic self healer. He changed his diet, started dancing, took to writing and performing poetry, and hasn’t stopped healing since.