Poet. Pirate. It's all the same really. They both pillage, plunder,
drink rum, look for treasure, and sometimes, after too many drinks,
they're known to throw a right hook or two. But that's the beauty of
poetry and piracy-it's unhinged, a stream of emotions that make you
laugh, cry, bleed, bruise, and eat oranges to prevent scurvy. It's an
adventure. It's feeling the wind on your face from the sea or the page.
It's tasting the salt in the ocean or in your tears. But most
importantly, it's the experience of getting from one port to another,
one page to the next, killing one more siren and murdering just one more
darling.
You see, piracy is about rules, and the number one rule is that there
are no rules. Pirate-poets live for the journey, they do what has to be
done to survive, and hope that karma, or a Kraken, doesn't come around
and bite them in the arse. Poetry is like that, too. It's a fleeting
moment, an image, that the writer is hoping will leave you breathless,
bruised, and stranded on an island.
Underwater Fistfight does just that, because Matt Betts is a pirate-poet
who takes science fiction and throws it in the brig with horror while he
sits outside the cell, laughing as they duke it out. He's a regular Davy
Jones, a sailor's devil, claiming the lives of these poems and dragging
them down to the locker to dissect, inspect, and sift through their
stories and characters like plunder.
