Thirteen short lines, no commas, and a single full stop that arrives only when the speaker has already left. Samuel Ludke's "Fighting" is built like a quick exit. It gives us just enough to sense that something has gone badly wrong between two people, then walks out before explaining. It is less about a fight than about the decision to leave one, and about the odd mix of politeness and coldness that decision can carry.
The title is slippery on purpose. The first line, "Fighting for a chance," sounds like struggle and hope, and "Just wanting to see you" follows it with unguarded tenderness. Both openings are fragments built on *-ing* words with no stated subject, like thoughts surfacing mid-argument and still unresolved. The poem's last word, "gone," is a finished state. The whole piece moves from ongoing wanting to completed absence.
The middle holds the poem's most intriguing image: "If the water burns / Take your hands out." Water is usually where we go for relief, so a burning one suggests pain where comfort was expected. The advice is practical and unsentimental, the kind you give someone without touching them. Judging by what follows, it is also the speaker's own method: when something hurts, withdraw. Hands then return in line ten, with "Blood on the back of your hands." The phrase echoes the idiom "blood on your hands," which hints at guilt as well as injury. "The back of your hands" pictures scraped knuckles, so the imagery points toward a physical fight, though the poem never confirms it.
The word that holds the poem together is "need," and it appears three times, each time with a different weight. "If I needed you / I would ask" is pride dressed up as independence: the speaker will not admit to needing anyone. Then comes the longest line, "But the enemy needed me first." It reads like an excuse, as if the enemy had booked the speaker's time ahead of everyone else. The enemy is never named. It could be a rival, a habit, or something inside the speaker, and the poem withholds the answer. Finally there is "You needed help," a flat, past-tense statement that records the other person's need without answering it.
The poem's tone is built from small, deflating details. After the grand word "enemy," the camera cuts to "I walked to the corner-store / Cigarette in hand." The second line drops its verb, so it reads like a snapshot of someone who looks casual, even bored. That ordinariness is unsettling. Blood and a cigarette sit a few lines apart with no change in voice, which suggests the speaker is either numb or working hard to appear so.
Formally, there is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm is that of speech, in short bursts. Several lines run to about seven syllables ("I walked to the corner-store," "Blood on the back of your hands"), but the poem tightens as it closes. "You needed help," "Blessings to you," and "But I'm gone" shrink to four, four, and three syllables. The lines contract like a door narrowing as it swings shut. The pronoun "you" also ends lines two, five, and twelve, so the other person keeps pulling at the poem until the final line cuts the thread.
That final stretch is where the poem turns cruel and strangely gentle at once. "Blessings to you" is a stock phrase of farewell, the kind that closes a letter or a conversation, and against the blood it sounds either sincere or chilling. Then "But" overturns it. The blessing is offered as a substitute for help, not an addition to it. The shift to a contraction and the present tense, "I'm gone," gives the last line the finality of a slammed door.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to say whether the speaker is wise or cowardly. Taking your hands out of burning water is sensible, yet leaving someone bleeding is not. The poem never tells us who "you" is, what the enemy was, or whether the blessing is meant kindly. In thirteen lines it shows how leaving can feel like self-protection and abandonment at the same time, and it leaves the reader to decide which of the two it is.