for the donnie moore never gone ilk

if earth disappeared,
would the rest of the galaxy really care?
would they even notice?
i feel you donnie moore and
if i knew you before you shot your wife three times and killed her and then killed yourself,
if i knew you, i would have encouraged you to
dance dance dance
dance more
lift up your legs and
dance dance dance
dance more
and then just maybe,
all that misery woulda passed and there’d be
another day…

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as smart as jesus and krishna…

i don’t remember when i first heard or read about religions, but it was interesting to discover that life possibly had meaning, that it was more than merely here today and gone tomorrow and that my great grandpa Leonard might be in heaven or reincarnated. i went to the library and looked up religions and the first book i came across was one called ‘religions of man’ by huston smith, a paperback, not too big, about the size of a 4×6 notecard, but it was thick, lots of pages and i carried that thing around and was pretty rough with it. i think i was reading the chapter on hinduism when the author said something about being all-knowing and i thought that was pretty cool, to know everything, to know the first starting pitcher to pitch 500 innings in a season because fast or slow, curve or straight, that’s gotta hurt the arm and also i thought it would be cool to know the third baseman for the tigers and the lineup of every major league team so i read about hindu gods and then made it to buddhism and i put a beach towel on my apartment bedroom floor and meditated or tried to, but most of the time my back slouched and i was thinking about stupid shit like what the people i knew thought about me and go figure, it didn’t do a damn thing. all that studying hindu gods and meditating and still, i couldn’t remember the third baseman for the tigers and so i gave up my desire to be all-knowing and settled on a normal life of ups and downs. but i did buy a baseball magazine and found out that the third baseman for the tigers was scott livingstone. He played 98 games in 1993. i felt like i was on my way…

trapped

It was one of those motels with lawn chairs set up outside the rooms, 50 bucks a night, cockroach tape beside the beds. In the lobby, the owner was watching tv. There was one of those windows on the ceiling, a skylight. There was a moth or a butterfly banging into the window, presumably struggling to get back outside.

An older man wearing a white button down shirt looked up at the moth or butterfly flapping away and then noticed the blue sky and he didn’t know why, but he thought about those times in New York when there were three baseball teams playing in the same city with that Coogan’s Bluff outside the Polo Grounds and kids probably sneaking into Ebbets Field and some other happenings at Yankee stadium.

Maybe he felt like the moth or butterfly and wanted what he could never have?

a few things

sometimes it’s a stance, a Cooper crouch that gets me. other times a name like lyman bostock. why such a great name? boston a lemon? a hyman stock?

i love warning tracks, not so much the crunch of gravel under foot or that to, but just the concept of one, a reminder to be vigilant with every step since we never know when a wall might suddenly appear.

the on deck circle is círculo de espera in spanish. espera means to wait and to hope. That’s a nice twist on the ho-hum of waiting, swinging a bat with donuts, a sledgehammer, yawning, looking into the crowd. That espera of hope seems to raise the temperature a bit.

Dugouts were once canoes and they sort of still are with teams going up or down river all spring and summer long.

A foul pole is a funny thing. So is a bullpen and all the secret things pitchers do there.

 

with runners on base, the retratification of the endospermedic metric

but a pitcher has a ball
and a batter has a bat
and like any game played
since colliding ponies and mud ball sling shots
it’s only a duel
and sometimes you win and
sometimes you don’t.