Friday, September 29, 2006

Tranq Out

I'm tired. Life is a challenge just to live. I have the choir in my ear with the evidence of Prester Bane before me. The Many-Armed-Knight stalks my late nights; I've given up on extended mornings. All I see are the products of my affliction: they are old. I'm taking the best way out: I'm taking tranquilizers. I can't stand being awake anymore.

Tranq Out

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Moments

I have to shepherd my life through each moment. Some are good; most aren't. I have to connect the good ones with as few bad ones as possible. Lately, that's been hard, but my life was worse in the past. Friends help; I'm a lonely guy and you make me less lonely. I love to hear from all of you. This moment is good; I can make no promises for the next.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Monster, Trust Me

When people ask me to use three words to describe myself, I use these: "Monster, trust me." I spend all day, every day alone. If I'm not playing Warhammer, I'm alone. I probably type more words than I speak. That's where I learned how to write. I read a rhyming dictionary, and found poetry. Poetry lead me to a bit of human contact through the written word. Chat rooms, creative writing classes, poetry and prose, all contributed to my writing. I thought for a long time that the product of my monstrosity would somehow lead me out of my own monstrosity. Needless to say, it didn't. Peace? I can bring myself peace, if I accept my monster. Understanding? Maybe it's ahead of me; it sure as hell isn't behind me. Love? Now that's a part of all of you that I can't have. I can try once, or a hundred times; none of that will matter. I don't think anyone could love me in a non-platonic sense. I'm interesting, charming, even compelling, if only for the first few hours you know me. I can write myself into anything. I can't live my way out of a paper bag. Once you hear all the stories, and all the inequity, my act becomes mighty stale. The same wounds hurt, and seek the same remedies. Old wounds, old cures, promise me anything.

anything

Up Early

I'm up early, not late. I woke up two hours ago as part of my effort to make more of mornings and less of evenings. So far, it's ok. I thought I'd be able to escape the loneliness of late nights and the despair of looking back on a bad day. My demons haunt me still, though. This morning is full of the same kind of crowded solitude that pervades my evenings; I believe I've just replaced the positions of the clock's hands around my neck, rather than slapping them in the manacles of early light.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Rough Going

Mornings are easier than nights. I spend too much time late at night, trying to get to sleep in pursuit of a better morning.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Pills Are Bullets, Too

It's all lies, isn't it? Do you think I'm a fool? I notice. I notice everything. Understanding eludes me, but at least Prester Bane doesn't lie and say we're friends, or close, or anything else but be my prison guard and torturer. How long were you all going to keep the charade? I approximate human behavior and sensitivity, but in the end, the only thing I've learned from you is to keep my mouth shut, and my eyes closed. Prester Bane doesn't bear false witness against me. I'm getting used to his company again. For a while, he was truly my best friend. I could always count on him being around in my hours of need. Sure, what he has to say hurts, but at least he's honest. He tells me I'm a monster; I'm inclined to believe him. When monsters hurt, we hurt like everyone else. I know, trust me. The crucial difference is that when people hurt, they have an outlet, or a friend, or especially a loved one. When I hurt, I have to hide. You will all seek me out and injure me if I don't. That injury ranges from a tounge lashing, to a tired sigh of indifference and conceit, to forcing toxic chemicals designed to make me feel better on me, and all the way to four points and a vacant room. If you don't believe me, just remember the last time any of you let me lean on you. I always take care of my so called friends; they have my undying love and support, even now when I am most alone. I have no one left. My options are exhausted. How many times has a friend of mine called me at 3:30 am, and received an answer? How many of you would welcome a call from me at this hour?

I shouldn't be angry with you. It's all inevitable. Once I stepped out of reality, I should have known that I'd never be allowed back in. Every day hurts. Every long night hurts. None of you have endurance for me even close to the endurance I must have for Prester Bane. He exhausts me, and won't let me sleep, pray, or do anything else. At least he's here.

Give me my bottle of tranqs and a pistol. I can make this very simple. Pills are bullets, too; they're just slow.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Poems I Wish I Never Wrote - Vol. II

The following poems are garbage from the youth that crawled down my throat and died:

COLOSSUS

Abandoning the silence
Of yesterday's address
Whose sound is heard unspoken
In effortless regress

A morning mist intruder
Is calling out for me
In excess I remember
Regretting what I'd be

"Improving what you're given
while fearing what you need
has made you an extremist
of solitary greed.

Impoverished by your actions
of fear, and hate, and spite
has left your voice abandoned
to raging at the night

your fear, unworthy yearning,
and unrepentant eyes
have made colossus larger
with truthfulness and lies."

If I could stop forgetting
And struggle to retain
Perhaps my eyes would open
And wash away the rain

If not a myth unspoken
If not a distant past
Perhaps an inspiration
Prolonging life to last

"A harbor's span of copper
alloyed with tin in hate
was wrought with contradiction
and hammering at fate

a massive strength illusion
it towers in the sky
a lie of strength and power
in rubble it will die

a raging summer tempest
a broken manly form
a statue rendered fallen
and broken by the storm."




I used to love that poem. What a fool I was. Arrogance and lofty wordplay can't make a poem.

***

BURN

Spin that cylinder
Pull that trigger
Burn that powder
Waste this life

I'm killing with a vengeance
This wasted life of mine
Not drunken-hearted madness
But madness none-the-less

When time becomes addiction
There is no other gun
But brandy in the bottle
And smoke upon the breath

My hatred comes to action
Against my hated thoughts
A gun against my temple
A song upon my lips

I took the steel for granted
And so I took the lead
I'm looking for the stranger
I see inside the mirror

His face is not expressing
The hatred in my heart
His address is unspoken
It's talking from the gun

"Hello my old friend
I see you've set me free
in letters on the page
the forces are in motion

"Your silence I will take
as your acknowledgment
that life is not worth living
except to feed the dead

"When everything is lost
but all my good advice
to take away your life
you'll know just who I am

"A cold blooded killer
and I'll get you in the end"




Yeah, he'll still get me. The end is closer every day. Spin that cylinder . . .

Old Wounds

An old friend of mine laments an Old Wound. Letting go is tough. I find my time frame for such things is not in weeks or months; I take years. At some point, I just have to stare myself in the face, pry the telephone pole out of my eyes, and realize what and who I am. The monster isn't in the fire of my eyes, but in the water, the deep water. As awful as I am with my choler, my melancholy is half again a measure worse.

My Old Wound never healed. The ankle gave out on me today, and the same voices that sang in High School invaded my ears. I'd almost forgotten the melodies in their laughter. Once broken in spirit or body, it's hard to reform whole. I find that the lingering threat of hurt never quite disappears. The fractions of my head seized upon a minor thing, and made my demons out of its aftermath. With as much stress as I put on my body trying to be the athelete I could never become, I should have expected an injury. As trivial as it sounds, my loss of that questing beast, my physical ambitions, ushered in my psychosis. I know that I probably would have lost my mind later, but the small things in life I always over-value like honor, truth, love, and strength, have always affected me inversely with their importance.

For now, the water deepens. On occasion, the burning furnace of my anger pulls me back out for a while, but the boiler is shackled to my feet. When it's done belching fire, I just fall back into my watery lair, no closer to clean air and happiness than I was in 1994, 1997, 1998, or 2004. Sure, I can write, but who reads? Sure, I can struggle, but who cares? In the end, I'm alone in this. I can write a canto to everyone I attach to myself or who lingers nearby, but all the words in the world never seem to do anything but pull me deeper.

Good writing comes with time. Think years, not months or weeks. The schedule of the pen is always outstretched by the demands of passing moments. Seneca cites Cicero as saying "that if the number of his days were doubled, he should not have time to read the lyric poets" (Seneca, Epistle LXIX). If reading lyric poetry is such a waste of time, think of the enormous waste of writing it. I aspire to epics, but in the end, I'm probably a lyric poet. Time isn't on my side. I can't meet the expectations of others or the progress of John Keats. I can only struggle with words, and hope for understanding after long intervals of time.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Tonight It Comes Shortly

This weekend wasn't kind to my pen. I wrote nothing save this. It's frustrating in here with my thoughts; I get so damn lonely. My friends in Tulsa have it rough, and there's nothing I can do to help them. There's nothing I can do to help myself anymore, either. When the time comes -- tonight it comes shortly -- I take my medication, which is ineffective at best. Sometimes I'm so alone with my thoughts that they stalk me and hunt me down. I'm good at hiding the disease from onlookers, but I'm terrible at helping myself when I need to be strong the most: tonight it comes shortly. Every sentence folds into the next, and I can't get away from the circles. Repeating myself is all I have left. A day will come when I've said it all, and no one cares about any of it. I can't quit, but life is recursive; I can't fix the past, and I seem doomed to repeat it. My struggle ceased being interesting and compelling a long time ago. Now it's just a menagerie of terrors collected and recorded in this blog and my verses: anyone who cares to listen has heard it all. I express my feelings over and over again, and this is where they lead. I need to take a tranq. Tonight it comes shortly.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Sleep as Defeat or A Comprimise to Forget

A friend commented on my blog recently about my insomnia:

Hey Thomas. I know what it's like to lay awake at night. Turn one way, you see a wall, Another, the ceiling, and maybe a computer. I've dealt with that a lot.

When I turn, I see Prester Bane, who has no face, The Many-Armed Knight, who wields many blades, The Harvester, his scythe, and feel the breath of the Scabbard Man on my neck as The Choir sings me away to the shores of Void. When I sleep, it's a further compromise. I have a feeling that my dreams are unpleasant, and have been for quite some time.

When I was young, I felt secure in slumber. I felt tucked in, and guarded. I clearly remember the beginning of dreams where I was in the arms of The Lord. He cradled me from before my baptism, and all through middle school. Every night I felt secure, like as long as I slept I was closer to God. Then everything changed.

I don't know if it was puberty, my disease, or both. Both manifested at the same time. No longer was I in the arms of The Lord; I was in the arms of women, girls really, my own age. At first, it was harmless: those kind of things were normal for boys my age. It wasn't long before the laughing followed me around, then a short hop to the man on the back of my hand. As the delusions and hallucinations intensified, lines between reality as you see it, as I remember only shards, and this hell I put myself through blurred. I started to drop time and gain time: time would pass in an instant, then I'd be locked into my hallucinations for eternities over thirty seconds.

I stopped going to church sometime in there. I felt distant, so distant that I don't remember when I stopped believing. I would claim a love for God in public; it was expected of me. However, I believed less. I can't say for sure, but it was lonely.

Now, I don't remember my dreams. I'm back in church, but it doesn't help me sleep. My nightmares are unpleasant, I'm sure. Sometimes, I wake up screaming, jumping out of bed and throwing punches. I made a bargain with my torturers sometime between the onset of my disease and my current state: the tormentors of my invention torture me about my Dad, my Brother, my weakness, my failed attempts at human contact, and my inability to escape the long, strong fingers of the hands that bind me. In exchange, I don't remember the nightmares. It's a far cry from a fair trade, but I need some time where I don't regret pulling the trigger again when asked if I wanted the gun to jam. I think things would be easier for me if I wasn't so trapped in my own solitude all the time.

Lately, I've tried to sleep in the arms of The Lord again. I don't feel warm, or protected. I feel cold and distant from those days. When I'm offered comfort, the hood of my comforter falls from his brow, to show a man without a face. The Choir sings me into slumber, as I mute their voices with painful songs I know could never be written for me. If I focus on Alison Krauss singing sweet words, and mix them with my conscious sentiment, sometimes I'm asleep quickly.

When the morning strikes me, I'm up and ready to face another day in this Hell I invented. I do what I promised, and try not to listen as Prester Bane and the rest taunt me into regretting pulling the trigger. I regret telling anyone sometimes. My feelings follow me. I wonder if I'd not written the note and made sure I wound up dead if the memories of my life in the hearts of others would suffer. I don't want to be the schizophrenic kid who suffers, and never lives up to the promise and talent everyone says I have. I want to sleep nicely. I want to feel closer to someone with a face rather than the bitter extremes of myself that usher me into the next moment.

The only prayers I can utter are pleas to "take me home." Every night, I go to sleep wishing to be home, and every morning, I'm back here in this compromise between my reality and yours. If this is home, I shudder to think what horrors await me as I turn inevitably inward into the shackles, dark rooms, and crowded solitude of my struggle. I sleep a lot.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Blessing This Morning

I played around with my Myspace profile after finding a photo of Robert Johnson's crossroads. Tonight, I fall asleep listening to his damnation. Sometimes I feel close to his pain; he hurts like I hurt. His gifts are large, but he always feels wanting. I know I can write a bit, but it never seems to bear sweet fruit, only bitter berries of pain. When I lie awake at night, sometimes I wish to go quickly just so I won't feel any more. I don't think I'd be so down if I didn't feel totally alone as much as I do. Too much solitude is as sickening as none. We're social creatures, but it seems I'm not.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Up Too Late

I know why I'm up too late. I try to extend my waking hours to encompass two blessings. Every morning, I wake up for a reason. That reason differs from day to day, but usually centers around promises. If I promised my Mom I'd do something, I get up to do it. I think comforting my family with something positive each day helps them by showing I'm still somewhat functional. Mornings are easier than evenings for blessings. Usually, when I finally fall asleep, I fall from exhaustion, not peace. I keep writing until I'm too tired to keep a point going for more than a few words. Lately, I've felt the need for two blessings stronger than I did even a short time ago. I measure events and life in years, not days or months. I don't want to go to sleep out of necessity only to wake up out of more necessity with the gnawing fact at the back of my mind that the future holds only more pain. I'm looking for a blessing tonight, but I can't find one. My affliction rules me. In the end, I have only Prester Bane and The Many-Armed Knight for fellowship. Tonight, and for quite a long time, they rule the dark hours. I don't know what to do or who to address with my problems. The doctors can't do any more. There is no magic pill to take it all away: I don't have problems with taking pills. I have problems finding reasons to wake up, and blessings to guide me into slumber. I'm not the only one with problems or pain, but I remain the only one who knows about the shackles and dark rooms of mine.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Writing Before Midnight

I write before midnight tonight so I can claim to write this weekend. I could pen truths about hallucinations, delusions, or the conditions of my melancholy, but I've penned those before. No matter how much I express myself, I'm still lamenting my solitude and the increasing strangeness of my life from others'. I love my writing when it attracts readership, but lately even that seems absent. I suspect it's the circular nature of my sadness. It's profound at times, but that profundity takes the same shape in regular cycles. If it's not my disease, it's the same sad and solitary state or a host of other mental maladies: all I've said before. Perhaps I've found the fruit of understanding, but the taste remains familiar and bitter. Love evades me, and peace I suspect is something I take away from myself with the constant agitation of my repeating, recursive cycle of distress. Whatever the reason, I'm up late without happiness or its pursuit; the night is young, and more of the same is certain.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Separation

It's autumn in the USA, and the year is evenly divisible by two. Elections are on everyone's mind. My effort in this blog is to reveal my poetry and my thoughts. I live just North of D.C. in Maryland, so I'm assaulted by politics every day of my life. For the most part, I'm perfectly willing to strike back with my own rhetoric. I haven't met a poet yet who even comes close to my side. It's frustrating, but that's life.

My main objection lies in separation. Lots of poets love to separate Trotsky from Stalin and Lenin. All three are in the same boat to me. I think the idea of Trotskyism as a clean form of Communism is a lie. I'm a poet and a dreamer, but I'm no one's fool. I write freely, and with only artistic constraints. I don't want a dictator, a theocracy, or an oligarchy telling me that I must write for them or not write at all. "If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant." That's Trotsky for you. I wish liberal poets at large would hold Communism to the same standards as Nazism. They would scoff at anyone who would seek to separate Ernst Roehm from his Nazi buddies. I like a system where I'm allowed to write what I want, and others are free to tell me what they think about my words in public.

I saw a young man at the airport wearing a hat with a hammer and sickle on it, and a shirt with some leftist attempt at wit. I was upset, but my father was furious. I guided his shoulders and mine away and intellectually reminded us both that we're supposed to turn the other cheek. He can wear whatever hat he wants to wear, but I think we should hold him to his choice. We should all be upset with such conduct, just as we should all be upset with some jerk wearing a swastika hat and a shirt with some racist attempt at wit.


This photo says it all. The symbols of red farm implements and broken crosses speak the same words to me.

Check this guy out, I think he's pretty cool. He owns his words, and doesn't mince them. I like to imagine myself as a man in his corner. Andrew Jackson's not my man. I'm not in a political party, and I don't want to be handcuffed to any particular group of idiots with a philosophy that pretends to know how to better run my life than I do.

My family got out of the Europe business in 1776, and I'm happy about it: Don't call me a European American. I think an honest mistake is better than a dishonest victory. If you wait around for a threat to appear, you've waited too long: wolves don't politely warn shepherds before taking a lamb. The laws of war only apply to soldiers. I think people should own their own statements, and not hide behind alcohol. Don't get lecture me on honor if you're an adulterer; if you break those vows, you don't have any honor left. You've got to start from scratch. Deion Sanders and Alexander Hamilton are good examples for a start. Jimmy Swaggart and Gary Hart are not.

Give me freedom to write and freedom to drive where I want. The state of Maryland denies me the latter. I want Christ in my life as I see him. I want transubstantiation and adult baptism by immersion. Give me public confession and the freedom to teeter between faith and works. I don't have a problem with saying "under God," but I respect people that genuinely do. I don't think we should outlaw flag-burning; it's a good way to figure out who's an ungrateful piece of garbage and who's not. I have an enormous personal problem with people who burn our Flag, and their supporters: art should be free, and so should art's critics. A ballistic missile program is an aerospace program is a ballistic missile program; those secrets are worth more than any campaign donation. Don't pardon your buddies because they lied for you. If a football player and his posse step into an alley to confront another group, and someone from that group winds up dead, stabbed to death by the posse, the football player and his posse are all murderers. Scale is important, especially when you're dealing with blood; therefore I'm more upset with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Tojo than the Baltimore Ravens.

Separation is the subject at hand. We can't separate liars, traitors, adulterers, murderers, and all other assorted scum from the ideas they create and spread. That includes me, the previous paragraph, and my pride. I own my poems, and I hold everyone to that standard. I'll bend, break, and throw myself aside for Christ, but everyone else save Enoch and Elijah gets to struggle with me.

The credit for the awesome t-shirt shot goes to http://www.mondophoto.net/south-east-asia/singapore/singapore09.html

Pull and Blood

The pull is strong tonight. Every breath shows fangs. Every doorknob, key, cell phone, and clump of pillow I clutch in my long, sharp claws. I want to walk into the night, like I did before. Not only do I want to walk, I can't close my eyes. Anything longer than a blink accelerates me into a hunt for people in my life. Stalking, hunting, prowling after you comes in waves shunted only by my open eyelids and a split second when I'm covered in blood.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Again

I'm up late again with problems. I don't want a tranq to fix it, either; I want a cure. I don't want to sleep perchance to dream and wake up in a pool of sweat throwing punches at phantoms just to erase my nightmares. Sleep makes time go by. It's not pleasant, but I don't remember anything from it. Deep slumber doesn't make my life less painful, it just makes my memories of each day smaller.

I forgot to take my meds on Saturday night until around this time Sunday morning. I barely made my way to Church, and almost fell over twice during services. I was so out of it, I think I missed the body of Christ in the Eucharist. During Sunday school (which doesn't stop at adulthood for Baptists), I was a zombie for almost all the class. I only snapped out of it long enough to argue that God's creation is imperfect, and that our existence is his primary mistake.

Global warming, acid rain, many mass extinctions, deforestation, pollution and a large bit of erosion are results of our activities that put the entire balance of his creation in jeopardy. All of that is a direct result of Noah's covenant with God. The Lord promised not to strike again with a flood, but we've done some awful things to Creation on our own, and perfectly fit them in Noah's covenant. When we exercise our free will, we don't just aggravate social ills that many see as Religion's purpose to cure, we do physical, and I fear irreversible harm to the very core of Creation.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Women

I write this post to explain a specific few things to a specific few people, but it's good info for anyone wanting to understand me. Aside from temporary shines and fancies, I've only ever wanted to be with two women: Christine and Jaime. It's rare for me to fall. If you're not one of those two women, odds are I never even thought of you. I probably would feel more love if I weren't so familiar with my monstrosity, and the certainty of all results stemming from that monstrosity. My life and my psyche revolve around my psychosis, my medication, and very little else. I have a small cadre of friends and family; they are very dear to me. I don't fall for strangers, either. I only have eight people on my myspace friend list for a reason. If you're a recently deleted friend off myspace, it's because you've angred or saddened one of my true friends, and I don't want anything to do with you. That should take care of the specifics.

Old Poems Once Treasured, Now Trash

I wrote too much on one person. She was important, but not as important as the time I spent writing her. Like everything else in my writing, she became something completely different than reality. I thought I'd ended that style late in 2003. I thought my writing graduated from its infancy. I was wrong. This is her:

ODE TO A RISING SUN

My days are spent deceiving
A love I couldn't be
A brightness that revealed
The light I cannot see

I knew that you were watching
Your eyes were wan with tears
A path to you was open
But blocked by petty fears

Regretting all that's given
With eyes not made to hate
A starboard wreckage plundered
A leap that came too late

In flying towards the answer,
The answer's turned away
I wrestled with my devils
And lost you in the fray

To love, to love my monster
While raging at the night
I wrestle with the wicked
Who struggle with the light

My nature has betrayed me
I howl at the moon
In high school, when I knew you
I dreaded every June

When waiting for September,
The summer Sun was grey
I cried July and August
To drown my days away

I know I knew I nothing
In wanting not but you
Whose soulful eyes avoided
The wickedness I knew

I smell my thoughts inside me
The residents in mind
The logic of the mad
The visions of the blind

I rage without protection
From time I let slip past
My anger buys me nothing
But memories at last

With tears of mercury
Reflecting on myfire
Of cinnabar and roses
Immortal in the mire

I thought I had more time
To deal with my madness
I see you with my visions
Through all my hate and sadness

With my own pen I scribble
The truth that I avoided
Our time was swept away
My cowardice destroyed it

I raged within my tempest
My eyes, I drowned in dew
I sat alone withdrawn
Away from what is true

I tried to pen a line
To dawning over lea
The way I wish I acted
And what I want to be

In iambs I have wandered
In rhymes I took a drink
Of time that I have squandered
Not knowing what you think

I wanted to approach
And rend my eyes to view
I lost my soul to fighting
And found it next to you

I want to know I loved you
But now I'm not so sure
I've squandered all my thinking
And thrown away the cure

I thought if I retained
The sorrow of our parting
I'd never be without
The madness that was starting

With thoughts that I could reach you
With thougths that we could fly
But reason in my wingtips
Absconded to the sky

In shame I had to crawl
Inside my own debris
A leap across the water
A drowning in the sea

The thoughts of light persisted
Unbreaking solar form
So blinding was your virtue
Unchanging in the storm

My view to you was fading
Inside my cage of pride
I stared into the ocean
And turned away the tide

I loved you in the morning
When I could see the dawn
I wished to crack the bars
Instead I sat withdrawn

I loved you in the evening
But strength was on the wane
I wandered in the grasses
While lost inside my pain

The bonds were cracked with feeling
I shed them with my blood
In taking up my armor
I swam into the flood

I caught you by the shoulder
Your face was bathed in light
The time was ripe for movement
And soon there would be night

I gathered up my anger
And set away my pride
I sat by you intently
And waited for the tide

I saw the new wind coming
And blowing towards the west
I knew that you'd be leaving
And never would I rest...

Goodbye my love forever



Bare sentiment can't hide my flaws as a writer and a person. Over a hundred lines of drivel, and all anyone can find out is that I can't write. What I thought was special was common. What I thought was exalting was simply pedestrian, and chiefly useless. I turned her into the object of two modestly sized epic poems: one I named The Amber Eye (go figure), the other I named Stitches. Stitches works, but it's a later work. I know my feelings are garbage now in Stitches. I've adjusted it similarly. I can't quite pull the trigger on a purge of my first epic: it has some gems in there. I fear my feelings will be largely garbage no matter who is the apple of my eye. My love inspires lies about the quality of my work, and the qualities of requitement. The pursuit of happiness for me seems to end up with me alone, typing cantos, correspondence, and this blog to an audience that will eventually see my flaws, and only my flaws. I know people get sick of me quickly, but I still have virtues. I'm faithful, kind, honest, and truthful. Truth is above all virtues to me. I'm also persistent and patient: I keep writing this type of post and this type of poem. All the posts are the same, and so are all the poems. All words from my pen only differ in proximity and scale. Only two questions remain. Who will spark my heart next? How long after the certain end will I hold on?

Sunday, September 03, 2006

So I took another look at the fight

Toney over Peter 114-113. I don't know what fight the two judges with 116-111 saw, but it wasn't this one. I looked hard at the twelfth round especially; it was a critical round. I counted punches, and examined the match; Peter did not win that fight. However, that should be moot. Toney took too many punches: way more than I've ever seen him take. He's a lion and a fighter, but he's spent too much time in the ring. I love James "Lights Out" Toney, but I can't watch him fight any more. I prefer to remember him at his best during the Jirov fight. He's the last of the truly great boxers.

In many ways, the Holyfield-Toney fight was the last clash of skilled heavyweights. I also think it's fitting that James Toney won that fight. The rest of the new heavyweights rely on weight to carry their huge frames over smaller fighters. Something's wrong with any weight class system that allows for fifty pounds of difference between legitimate competitors. I'm quickly becoming a fan of boxing outside of the heavyweight division. It's not even the fighters' fault most of the time: it's just damn hard to beat someone fifty pounds heavier in pure fisticuffs.

MMA is a little different: small guys can submit huge guys given appropriate circumstances. However, now that Pride gives out penalties for grappling for a stalemate, and the UFC is breaking stalemate grappling by standing the fighters up, the big men turn over more and more wins over smaller opposition, just like the huge boxers. Vitali Klitchko, Lennox Lewis, and Tim Sylvia always had more brawn than skill. Even a novice fan can see that. After about 205 lbs, sport fighting is fast becoming a yardstick and a scale more than a competition of courage, strength, and skill.