Cock Fight

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My first cock fight was on TV. The national sport of the Philippines is an indigenous offering, more popular than three American contenders - basketball, baseball and volleyball. There is no more wonderful exposure of the double entendre in 'cock'. Eight men- muscles taught, drinking- spit and shout at the screen. In a spray of blood the fight is over. The winning cock, still flapping, is dragged off camera. In testosterone-fuelled celebration, the winning punters snatch their cash. Losers sit emasculated.

My newbie's reaction to the fight was typical. Was that it? But it was so quick! The fight itself is nothing but a bloody stage where men battle over more important things - money, power, masculinity, sex - all in the context of 'cock'.

My second fight was on a street corner. Again, it was over before I was aware it had started. I couldn't elbow my way to the front in time to see anything but was hit by a unique fusion of smells- human sweat and chicken shit - absent from the televised fight, and the sound of blood letting: slash, splutter, squirt - the crowd leaps back - and then the irregular splashes of the cockerel emptying onto the pavement.

Avoiding the aftermath, as I turn to walk away, something crunches under my left foot and I look down and I cry out in a voice unrecognised in the sudden reality. I have trodden on a dying fighting cock. I have broken his neck. His head is alive and helpless, twisting, burrowing and reaching to the left. His body is dead and heavy. My foot has collapsed his neck like a squashed hose. Perhaps it will pop back up with a satisfying release of air? There is tension under the skin. Something horrible is happening at the break. His neck still jerks, throwing ripples across his feathers. Tension increases through a suppressed whimper. A crack, a whip-like convulsion and the bone breaks the skin with a violent fart. Membrane bursts. An ejaculation of blood lands hot on my ankle. The cock wheezes. The bone hangs in the air like a snapped mast. The cock still breathes. The bone pitches and yaws. His head digs aimlessly in the dirt. I want to stamp on the head in wretched mercy but cannot move so I stare into the eye of a dying bird, an anonymous victim. Nobody cares. I thus stand by my initial conclusion that cock fighting is between men, not cockerels.

http://s7.zetaboards.com/PPooDD/topic/8389849/i

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