and so it’s warm again and there’s more going on than what’s in my head. all those days running from a hospital to a booze store to back home to a friend’s apartment, back and forth and all around, head down, in a hurry for heat ducts and hot showers and blankets and now there’s birds chirping and pine cones dangling from evergreens and squirrels racing across wires and it was always there. i just didn’t see it. didn’t see that perfect game by some japanese pitcher either. struck out 19 and will no doubt be on the yankees next year.
Tag Archives: poetry
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…
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…
a milwaukee trespass
the nurse was Mrs. Z. and she never told us what the Z stood for and we never asked. Her little dispensary was beside our elementary school’s main exit, the “BIG EXIT” as we called it because when you walked through those doors, the day was done. she wasn’t trained as a nurse. the school was probably saving money. she was small, freddie patek small, maybe five feet. looked like a cute old mouse. she had good, minty breath, made you wanna be near her. we pretended to be sick or intentionally scraped our elbow at recess to draw a little blood and if we managed to make it past the initial border crossing – the teacher and reach Mrs. Z’s little room with the turquoise-colored dentist chair, then we had made it…..and ‘made it’ meant a get out of jail free card, a walk through the BIG EXIT and a stroll home, a short 20-40 minute walk and all afternoon to play some video games, sort some baseball cards, or do whatever us kids liked to do when we were pretending to be sick.
kiowa migrations
travelling north america by jalopy side roads
snapping photos of all the baseball diamonds i bump into
and forgetting i’m going to die one day.
roses from a sacramento bunker
there were noises outside the basement window…
probably tanks rolling over gravel.
old Blinker let out a farmer’s blow of green slime and
snuck under his basement steps.
he flipped on a flashlight,
removed a box of 1974 Topps
and thumbed through them,
happy all over again that he was only missing two cards from the entire 660 card set –
number 13 – Tom Hilgendorf and
number 409 – Ike Brown
he wondered what the Hilgendorf and Brown cards looked like.
he’d never seen them.
head first dive into second?
batting cage casual?
contorted motion?
pitcher?
catcher?
the questions resurrected a no longer dead part of his mind.
sudden thoughts of Bill McNulty and his 55 homer season,
1974,
Pacific Coast League,
Sacramento Solons.
The Blinker rolled his fingers like a beginning piano player.
forever cocktail
the baby mobile that once spun slowly above him in reality or dreams or both blurred together
would just make him drunk circle dizzy now.
and his body was never much to begin with
but now his ribs can be seen and there’s other things…
the fists he once carried into playground battle are now parked beside the prayer hall
in search of??? and all he gets is an echo that says in an oz like baritone – it’s out of your control.
are we all failed experiments? suddenly?
steve blass forever?
care for a drink?
on a day vows are almost taken
i’ve never seen a mushroom cloud or i have, but only on tv….kind of beautiful which makes me wonder if the end of the world will be the same…sitting on a porch sipping one harveys wallbanger after another, hoping the vodka will never run out, contemplating god, maybe even talking to the the great one, ted williams, and then after a little rumination about next destinations, if there are any, that mushroom dust cloud closing in, my thoughts will switch to how close Joe DiMaggio came to hitting more career home runs than striking out and just as i start to choke on the radiation fumes, up comes some new “oil can” Boyd pitcher nicknamed “moonshine” Mankowitz, hailing from some old, almost forgotten Mississippi town, and i will him with me for a beer or his preferred boilermaker, and down they go and down we go, two mushrooming spiral drunks with mike witt last day 1984 season perfect game smiles.
milwaukee is often called brew city
getting hooked on old world series highlight videos, the ones that show fans cheering, player’s lovers, and have a narrator. well, i was wondering about sober and all those addiction hotlines and the thing is there’s nothing better than being drunk on world series highlights videos so screw the hotlines, I’m going back to the 1979 world series highlight film and getting drunk off that, with omar moreno’s weight which couldn’t have been more than 170 and yet, the wind didn’t whoooooosh him into the next town and willie stargell’s arm pumping and some oriole’s hair and the only 11 hit shutout in post season play, which didn’t happen in 1979, but I bet it was a lazy, afternoon game back when playoff games were played in the day so kids could run home from school and enjoy the game sweating not really concerned with the math of it all.
it’ll be nice to see you again…
way back when
so many years ago
so many moments ago,
yesterday,
there was an opening day first kiss and a long holding hands and world series fight and another first kiss.
i love red cheeks and rich people and poor people and people walking and people rolling wheel chair and it makes me think about the the origin of species and creation versus evolution, but abstract and everybody thought about that. vomiting drunk morning in the high school bathrooom stalls. we became allies but I had my own experiences. I’d seen a pile of abandoned clothes on the side of the road and it reminded me of a salt pillar from sunday bible class, but fuck it I’m turning. i’m looking at that salt thing. i’m going to 14th and hopgood with my brown paper booze bag, where we can have a whisky in park bench flask heaven.
brewers baseball and things 