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Tyson vs. Frazier
Jul 26, 1986
Civic Center, Glens Falls, New York, U.S.
There is, of course, the gritty specter of genealogy, the voices we think we hear, phantom limbs throwing their haunted punches. Clarified in the light of passion, rag doll, we dance and fall and crumble. Mysteries hidden within stones, their desolate weight, and the coldness of the universe within those black lights Muhammad Ali spoke about. Outward and visible, inward and obscured, our signs of grace, clinging and cleaved to with ropes and gloves, deathrock and horrorpunk, a body on the canvas, propped up by bones rather than by consciousness. Within this legacy of brutality, we count the visible synonyms.
Tyson vs. Thomas
May 30, 1987
Las Vegas Hilton, Winchester Nevada, U.S.
Imagine the rounds are stanzas, the fight a poem. Line breaks, enjambment, and rhythm. A torn glove on this hard road to glory. New and deadly dimensions, dramatic irony and alliteration. For example: Pinklon Thomas sparred with a boxer nicknamed Scrap Iron. Refrain, repetition. Mike Tyson throws fewer punches in combination, those power punches, hydrogen bombs. Synecdoche, epic, anaphora. Imagine the rounds are stanzas: Mike Tyson ends it in the sixth with a flurry of hooks, left and right. Blood from Thomas’s lip drips down his chest. The real ferocity of a man in action, the poem and the page.
Tyson vs. Botha
Jan 16, 1999
MGM Grand Garden Arena, Paradise, Nevada, U.S.
The aesthetic of the rejected, the forbidden, the discarded. As if left to die by stereotype, a lessening, a scattering. Be real: it’s dark and Hell is hot. Mike Tyson is not replaced by Mr. Dream, but haunted, cursed. The same moves, and yet not the same: doppelgänger, body double, unwanted twin. Grab the arm and twist, try to break it. Clinch after the bell, swing and push. Mike Tyson’s aggression has faded by the fourth round. When Botha feints, Mike Tyson flinches. The unspoken, the understood; the wicked and the flame like a leaping trestle, all quiver and rust.
[…] arc as a boxer with the story of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. (You can read a few of the poems here at Into the Void.) I don’t want this column to devolve into relentless self-promotion, but at […]
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