At some point little fetus, bud-eared plum
starting to turn inside your mother like
a conspiracy away
from the light, you'll need
a name. The following
are taken: Jimmy "Living
Nightmare" Lee. Robby
the Redneck Kid and Uncle Buzz
saw Shaw. Madman Fulton. Random
Pain. "Atomic" Titus Dynamite (aka the Micro Menace).
From the PA's static cave
they swagger like a string of bow-
legged wolves, orbiting
each wrestler in their paunchy leather
as they pace and menace the ring
praying, in a way, to the name they bent
their mat-burned necks
to the vast unspeaking firmament
of language and stitched together,
a constellation of words
jagged as a ladder rejointed
in the dark, manly as a wound
sewn shut in a van stripped to the rivets and rattling
down a nameless highway towards
some skewed version of healing.
We pay 10 each to watch them
proffer elbows, knees and yellow
calf-high boots, ombréd mullets and wormy white-boy dreads
swaying on top of razored skulls,
sour sweat, spaghettied PCLs, jab-bruised flesh
to these names that are
never brained against a turnbuckle or
leveled by a beige
and flaking folding chair or arm-pinioned, leg-
wrenched into a half genuine half staged submission—
they just get heated
to scald or soothe or burn
like water, sulfurous and bubbling,
surging inside the audience (us)
because we have come to be
a territory
stitched with rocky seams that even
as it splits and fissures builds
a solid ledge. On which
to stand. From which (to cheers) to leap.
