Outsider

The week's bloggings on the theme of outsider have been mostly of a personal and confessional nature, but I'm going to buck the trend as this one is going to be impersonal and (...I'm not sure confessional has an exact opposite). Plus it has to be brief, as I'm short of time I'm afraid; (pressing affairs on behalf of Blackpool Supporters' Trust).

I'm thinking slim chances, long odds, underdogs. We all like to see an underdog win, but they so very rarely do - and maybe that's because when it comes down to it they don't really want to?

Better perhaps to be a beautiful loser than an ugly winner? (Discuss.)

The best side is the outside

This somewhat cryptic take on 'outsiderness' is new and can be filed under oblique accounts of people we know; (more correctly, used to)...

underdog
this is underdog
still trying to convert
the hounds he hears in his head
into poetry and song
soundbites howled with feeling
into unrequiting night
words punched out
through gritted teeth
in baskerville twelve point type

with the benefit
of hind-leg sight
he might not have cocked up
in quite the way he did
pissing opportunities
up the wall
in pursuit of
so singular a vision

but underdog
is not looking for your pity
as shorn of respectability
shunned by the pack
and shunning them back
he straddles a line
between genius and madness
underdoggedly
shambling towards epiphanies to be borne


Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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