I’m opting out of the day 18, 2018 NaPoWriMo prompt. Instead, I wrote this poem.

Fight was His Game

Poor boy whose story we were told,
Danny was his name, fighting was his game.
Young and strong, with dreams of glory in his fists.
He fought to save his life, to be proud and ever bold.

Promised wealth with violence
Would bring so many gifts.
No warning was to move him
from his promised dream.
Boxing and his future, were both all agleam
It was his game, to be his fame, no one interfered.

In the pit of misery, while still just a boy
Trusting words of strangers, and what they had to say.
In the roaring twenties ring
he took the fighter’s stand,
Seeking victory and honor, with his body and his hands
Many marred and broken,
This Danny boy was all aflame.

Stepped into the ring, a fight to be his game.
Still looking for a young man’s fame.
Dan stood strong and determined.
He faced the champ, who gave that boy
quite a beating with a lesson.

Badly beaten, he lost the fight,
And all his pride went with it.
The champ made him a chump
looking too sad and lame.

Still more boy than man, with spirits badly broken,
He searched for work and asked for jobs.
A boy inside, with dreams gone south and broken.

Now the boy was older
In all the world’s wrong ways,
Now laying low without his game,
Still, Danny was his name.

(Bill Reynolds, 4/18/2018)

Look both ways and duck those punches, mind the gaps right cross.