by James Finn Garner
As we take a pause for the All-Star Break
And the promoters fall over themselves,
There’s a confession I feel obliged to make:
I haven’t given a shit since age 12.
Baseball’s a Thing of the Heart
by Bill McCurdy
The gossamer wings of baseball soul
Float gently in the breeze,
Soaring high, from here to the sky,
On the winds of thoughts that please.
We grew up reflecting, wistfully back,
To moments measurable in time,
From Big Six Christy to Babe Ruth’s 60,
Each memory soared sublime.
Then came the voice of Barber
To mind sketch on our brains
The frames of sculpted sentiment,
As “the catbird seat” explains.
We bought the face of heroes
On colored baseball cards
To float in what we could not see,
In the words of the radio bards.
We took these winds and ran with them
On vacant lots and streets.
Our bodies hugged the earth’s sweet crust,
But our spirits soared in sheets.
In sheets of high plane color
Filled in by all who soared,
Our souls reached out and found our wings,
Life’s breath was not ignored.
And now when things like drugs and greed
Hi-tech us from all corners,
Attacking all the sweet spots,
Sometimes I fear we’re goners.
Gone from the floating hope
For a better world above
That we once found with baseball,
Bare feet – and a ragged glove.
So fight for all worth keeping.
Baseball gave us our start,
There needs be no loss-weeping,
For our game’s a thing of the heart.
Bill McCurdy writes about baseball, with a particular focus on the great state of Texas, at The Pecan Park Eagle.
Fenway Park at Season’s End: Wally the Green Monster
by Rich Bowering
October. Wally lights a cigarette,
Takes a long drag, stares at the glowing tip.
Sits somewhere in Section 42. It’s quiet.
He can still hear his mother’s shrill yap:
Don’t have babies with people.
But he did, and that night of unprotected sex
Produced little Jimmy, with greenish skin, who
Hangs his big square head as he walks down the hallway at school,
Half-boy half-mascot. The shotgun marriage was over
In six months – a freak for mascots, she left Wally for
Dave, the Self-Denying Fish. Finally settled for (of course)
The Fightin’ Mule, encountered outside a porn trade show.
Jimmy doesn’t want to learn the trade.
But what else will he do? Same attitude as Lobster-Boy’s kid.
Flicking his Lucky Strike, Wally swallows the last of his
Jack Daniels and, groping down the concourse to piss,
Stops to hose down a wall. No matter.
Minutes later he stumbles across center field, and words bear down
On him like a necklace of tires: Divorced. Absent father. Clown.
Wally knows that mascots are really just rowdy tourists
In the human world, covered with the foreign dust of ball fields:
Green and fuzzy! Spouting macabre caricatures of human heads,
And grotesque limbs! Flashing huge animal claws and teeth!
Looking up at the scoreboard before entering the secret door
And going to bed for the winter, he whips a crowd of pigeons
Into a great frenzy. One day his son will look in the mirror and see
Behind his own green head the shadows of a thousand human faces
Waiting for his cue. He will hear in that moment the roar that signifies
Both icon life and icon death.
Rich Bowering is the author of Big Fire at Spahn Ranch.
When Any Lot Would Do
by Bob Carlton
the ground ball skips
kicking up dust
and the smell
of wild onions
gathering stains
breaking stitches
before finally spinning
into the comfort
of a glove
just as worn
Maybe I Am The Phantom of Baseball
The Found Poetry in the Tweets of Jose Canseco
by Patrick Dubuque
Maybe I am the phantom of baseball
I will do anything for one more at bat
I know I can still hit MLB pitching
I can still hit a golf ball 380 yards
I have the hips of a 20 year old
I can
I have
I have a medical condition:
I love the game so much
Even in exhibition
Invite me for an old timers game
I will play
Anything for a look
Still dreaming of that one last
Trip of imagination
Back to the big leagues
I miss everything where did it go
Patrick Dubuque blogs regularly for Pitchers & Poets, where this first appeared.