"Big Deal. If I could swim as good as him,

Spectator’s comment on Mark Spitz’s

Let’s get mad, fellow losers, fellow flops,

fellow dust eaters, fellow weepers,

fellow had-a-wife-and-couldn’t-keep-hers,

let’s get mad and bad and high in the stirrups!

They never liked us, never gave us diddley

when we needed a break. Who the hell are they,

anyway? A hundred thousand softies, tops,

moping over their petit fours, worried

that the help these days is getting too

uppity to lick a boot, or that the snowpack

at Aspen might be, well, simply intolerable.

We’re billions strong, tough as dandelions,

raised on humble pie and hind tit,

we’ve had a bellyfull, up to our eyeballs.

Don’t forget: without us, winning’s

obsolete. So let’s knock off the oo’s

and ah’s, the encores, the Wall Street Journal.

Let em play the Superbowl to an empty

Superdome, let the election returns read zero

to zero, let em fight the next war

by their lonesomes, with caviar and empty

Mouton Rothschild bottles. Boycott their movies,

their mouthwashes, their douche bags, their life

insurance, their grinning eight-by-ten glossies.

We’ll show em what losing’s like, put

the boots to em, head em off at the pass, trap em

in a box canyon, take their children hostage

and teach the little snots our primitive ways,

to say "Oh well" and "What’s the use" when they

take the wrong turnoff, bobble the punt,

borrow from the guy with the two friends

named Principal and Interest. Leave em with nothing

to fall back on but a rock and a hard place,

the devil and the deep blue sea, chaos and

old night, aces and eights, Household

Finance and the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes. And let

all their letters begin with, "Dear Applicant:

Thank you for letting us see your resume" or

"Dear Customer: A good credit rating

is a serious responsibility, not a right."

We’ve got the bench, we’ve got general admission,

we’ve got bad stomachs, bad arches, bad

checks, bad timing, bad luck,

bad news, and the worst, the very worst

intentions. Remember "Wrong Way" Corrigan,

General Burgoyne, Harold Stassen, Pickett’s

Charge, the electric spaghetti fork, Troy

Donahue, Troy, the Edsel, leisure suits,

Dynaflow, the Maginot Line, and Casey

at the bat, not to mention Uncle Sol

and his worm farm. Let’s reach down

for that minus ten percent, that faulty premise,

those visions and revisions, that bush-league,

cockeyed, backfiring, two-left-footed,

shit-for-brains urge to go out there

and do something,

sort of.

William Trowbridge

Enter Dark Stranger. 1989. University of Arkansas Press.