What a Man Earns, He Keeps

The Ghost of Death By Me has had a great deal to say in recent days, and I have listened to every word with the patience one extends to a man who does not yet understand how accounting works.

You called me a loser, Ghost of Death By Me, and you called me a nobody, and somewhere between those two charges you complained that I failed to riff on a joke about milkshakes, as though the business of this ring were a parlor game and I your straight man hired to feed you lines. I am not in the business of feeding anyone. I am in the business of taking.

You speak of levels. You speak of lacing boots and collecting urine and the long distinguished arc of your career, and every word of it is the same currency: inherited reputation, borrowed altitude. You have convinced yourself that esteem arrives before the work. It does not. The work arrives first. The esteem, if earned, follows quietly behind.

The audience in that building has paid for something real. I intend to provide it. Whatever you believe you are, Ghost of Death By Me, you will be something considerably smaller when this is finished.

I do not lose territory I have claimed. That is not poetry. That is the terms of the contract.