Born on Independence Day
He died on Yom Kippur
A long, long way from Brooklyn
The toughest man Mike Tyson ever met,
Who carried still the relish of a child.
The air and soil are silver,
The trees and grasses black
But it’s not enough to show
What he has done
To a game and a world
We see differently now:
The rebel who can win by just surviving,
The masks of Halloween worn every day,
A team for all the outcast individuals,
A way to compel honor into honesty:
Embracing the brutality,
Setting free creativity,
Honoring the disease
And the sacred field whose wizards must be appeased.
They wear the colors of the color blind,
They find their dream in darkness,
That thing always excluded
From the other half-right codes.
Their greatness can only be perverse
Because it can stay human.
It’s a season of deaths, of the innovators,
Whose dreams were never really possible,
But we dream of further places thanks to them—
Here’s to a man who held onto his dream
24/7 for nearly 50 years
With the tenacity of a savage:
The team, the brand, the mystique—all his!
We know him in the thing that he created
But we’ve never known the man we loved to hate,
The man in black who gave it all in service
So we could go more vertical to the light.
