Defeated by Martin Willitts Jr.

He tried to fight the wind blowing him back.

He had an urgency to get somewhere

and lost, cursing like an artesian,

the language of failure.

Every wish he’d ever had was taken,

torn down, blasted, shotgunned —

every brilliant idea, tossed into a ravine.

He could take a survey of his life and find

nothing but debris, the knife edges of insults,

to degrees of separation, the longing

always returning like a plague.

Every failure was razor-sharp —

the steel mill closed, windows rock-smashed

and turning blind eyes; the stillborn

he had no money to bury properly;

the calico blotches found in his chest x-ray.

He couldn’t keep this up.

He’d done this for far too long.

When he went into the bar, he wanted to fight,

be stomped on, bleed out, and maybe,

just maybe, then, the pain would end.

There was so much sadness wherever he looked.






Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian. He has over 20 chapbooks, plus 15 full-length collections.  His most recent chapbook is "You Enter, and It All Falls Apart" (Flutter Press, 2019).