by Gerard Sarnat, MD
There are two kinds of light: glow that illumines and glare that obscures.
— James Thurber
Once Hollywood Star Minor League baseball ballplayer’s feet of clay.
Spoofing calls, false wet signatures, our guilty dog barks the loudest.
Toothless guy with tobacco juice dribbling down each double chin.
Avowed eyeglass lenses thick as bottom of some old Coke bottle.
Hometown heroes as super-villains tend to weather storms.
Cloudy undergraduate eleven-year plan, dishwasher blahs
— black helicopters land backyard next to my clown car.
That’s in 1953, the year .213 hitting Señor Outfielder
played his only full season in the Majors with
last-place Pittsburgh Pirates after The Mick
hit a 500-foot home run landed on Forbes
Field’s roof during an exhibition game.
Bernier fell on dark times later in life.
Homeless near the end, he was found
dead in a garage the result of suicide
autopsy ascribed to strangulation.
Twenty-nine years this month
since Carlos bit proverbial
dust, after his sad hanging
may he now rest in peace.