For no reason other than the closeness of my bar stool, the
stranger with a vacant look and deep facial scars stares at me as
if we were competing gladiators.
The stranger with the vacant look and deep facial scars asks a
question that only men who read too much Hemingway or do
not read at all ask.
Do you want to take it outside?

The stranger with the vacant look and deep facial scars has
someone’s fresh blood splashed like small rivers on his shirt
red paint on the dismal canvas that is his life.
The fates have not been kind to the stranger.
the snake eyes that keep coming up each morning when he
wakes up to no future
are passed on at night to unsuspecting strangers.

I want to tell the stranger with the vacant look and deep facial
scars that my life, like his, is filled with stale truths, bad fortune
and hoped-for sunlight come the morning,
but why waste words?
When you’ve got nothing, Bob Dylan says,
you’ve got nothing to lose.
there have been bigger men, whochallenged me in bars,
but their eyes were not cold and empty like the stranger with a
vacant look and deep facial scars.
they had pretty boy faces or expensive suits,
families or jobs waiting for them –
something to lose, which makes them vulnerable.
the strangers face tells me that all that makes him a loser in life
will make him a winner if we step outside.
The stranger’s daily fight for survival and don’t give a shit attitude
make him invincible.

Irish featherweight champion, Barry McGuigan, explained why
he was a ferocious fighter who always answered the bell.
"I can’t be a poet, I can’t tell stories," said McGuigan,
"so I carve up others."

I do not want to be the protagonist in a story without words the
stranger wants to tell tonight.
or give satisfaction to the hangers on whose keen anticipation
of a brawl turns their faces primitive, grotesque, brutish, like
George Bellows painting "Fight Club."

After the holocaust, the world appears a vacant place with deep
scars that can never be removed.
"In your personal struggles with the world," Kafka said,
"bet on the world."
Ladies and gentlemen, on this barstool with a bloody shirt and a
don’t give a shit attitude representing the world is the stranger
with a vacant look and deep facial scars
and on this barstool wearing a confused look
is a poet struggling to find the meaning of life
in a world gone crazy.

I nurse my drink until the stranger is distracted by a woman with
jeans so tight her fleshy stomach oozes out like meat pouring
out of a sausage casing.
with a poetic sense of drama and incredible ring savvy
I beat a hasty retreat from a world I no longer understand.