A boxer sits in his corner. Soaking sweat. Nirvana is a lactic delirium. Deliverance. Awakening. Free of empathy. There are no hoops or helmets for passive-aggression. There is only an understanding: Two beating hearts encased in well-trained flesh, looking to pump more blood to faithful conditioning and unseen variables while seeking destruction in the opponent. Concentric and eccentric movements demonstrating force into the nervous system of someone else. Sharing something. Handing over ownership of painful energy. Freeing aggression into a physically violent truth. Three minute spells of survival. If you could hear the ringing bell, you're still alive to fight again. There's always another fight. A night watchman with an eye peeled on the rising sun. A flash of fury. Results of practice and endless days filled with repeated loss of sweat/blood. The sacrifice of comfort in quest for higher identity. The training becomes the purpose. The theoretical punches for battles yet to come. The summation of which arrives in the form of a bout. The fighter's life exchanged for this liberation. There, the clanging bell.
Touched gloves. Dance. Chess game of feet. Timing of punches. Knuckles meeting inertia. Velocity and strength formulating applied impetus. Seeking weakness. The eyes of the crowd gauging intangibles. No one knows what feats can rise from the ashes, confusion, unconscious desperation to live. Genius can spring reality, annihilating talk of reach or records. Electric charge can spark a fire inside the muscle fibers. Conditioned instincts can rapidly change moments. In a flash too fast for your eyes, something occurs. Most of the exchange is guesswork by each viewer's own magician brain. While the next frame watches the other soul already floating along gravity's merry way. Slamming down on thinly veiled wood. Shattering the tender balance of bipedalism. The body laying on the blood spattered canvas.
From high above it must look like framed art.
The referee counts while the crowd screams and yells. The man who also came to destroy is now seeing only black. A dark and honorable black that fades in and out with a skewed sense of time. Do you hear me son? He listens to one consistent buzzing in his ears and nothing else.
The one still standing feels equally the pain he distributed, for it's energy had once belonged to him. But now he's a winner by KO.
