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- Remember Sonny Liston
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- My son swaggers home from school
- hand bandaged like a fighter’s
- describes his day’s slice of life
- outpointed by a Stanley knife.
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- Routine events that scunnered me
- burn through the lattices of my brain
- memory like hunger.
- Tracking over the past’s terrain
- has become my obsessive way
- losing myself in life’s decisions
- wins losses mostly draws now
- his wound reminds me of sheetmetal
- days of cold steel my hands heart
- crisscrossed with cuts oil-stained charts.
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- Those factory hands.
- Suspicion of education art
- travel sexual love ambition.
- We believed Sonny Liston’s huge hands
- would destroy that dancing poet Ali.
- The Mob owned Sonny whose wife
- taught him to sign his photographs.
- Crouched smoking by those awful machines
- we heard Ali humble Sonny for his sins
- showcase style and self-belief.
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- My son asks for painkillers
- a world from the past’s morphine dreams
- brake press burial and guillotine
- memory’s surprising scar tissue.
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