The Adversary

The Adversary

Before you get to love a proper enemy,
you have to earn one first,
Have to push hard enough
and long enough to make someone the worst
Of their previous assumptions about what they could hold,
Until the adversary standing opposite starts getting bold.

He showed up at the moment when I needed opposition most,
Not a friend and not a phantom but a proper worthy ghost,
Someone who had read the same pages I had read,
And showed up at the table with a plan already fed.

The adversary makes you better or he makes you quit,
He finds the specific pressure and applies a perfect hit,
The adversary knows your methods and has read your every tell,
And the man who beats a worthy one has got a hell of a tale to tell.

I watched him in the margins of the meetings that we shared,
The way he calculated just exactly how I had fared,
He was mapping my position with the same tools I was using,
And I felt the competition sharpen into something more than bruising.

We did not speak of it directly, that’s not how these things run,
It’s conducted in the subtext of decisions being done,
In the timelines and the pitches and the credit and the scope,
In the patient, daily war of who is giving up all hope.

I won but what I kept was more important than the prize,
The edge I built to beat him lives behind these narrowed eyes,
Without the adversary, I’d have softened at the center,
He was the sharpest thing I faced in every room I’d enter.