February 20: Working on Yoda, W. Todd Kaneko, "Every Night, the Super Destroyer"

Hey guys and gals.  I don't have a whole lot of time for poetic reflection this evening.  I am determined to write a Star Wars poem this weekend.  I don't know when or how I will do this, but I am working on Yoda.  Hopefully, the Force will be with me this weekend.

Another dead wrestler poem.  W. Todd Kaneko rules.  Body slams other poets to the ground.

Saint Marty needs to get his geek on soon.

Every Night, the Super Destroyer

by:  W. Todd Kaneko

A body plunges through the main event
to the canvas, hammer locked, choked,
a death twitch, yoked to a mangle of bone.

A wrestling match can be deadly for a man
who believes in pain, who envies cruelty
hidden behind grim faces.  No--I go back
to being a boy with my father in 1979,

watching that sinister mask and a man
struggling in vain against the claw
holding him above the ground.  My father
places his palm in the center of my back,
a tether to the real world where people die
real deaths every night.  It's terrifying,
this battle between puny mortals
and that faceless adversary on the other side
of the ring.  I pull sorrow into my arms at night,
the way a man pulls another close, knowing
one of them must soon be defeated.

When I watch men fight on television,
it is my father in the grip of the masked man,
it is me held aloft by the face and slammed
heavy to the floor.  We are all twisted
into terrible shapes before the final bell.

The Super Destroyer slams a poem