You may not have heard of poet Toby Tacoma. Until now.
The greatest ever is what they will say,
Leading the squad by your words and play.
Sweetest swing when it’s time for clutch,
Oh, Captain! My Captain! Where are you Dutch?
Boileryard, you’ve risen above things,
But you’ll never be above
Slipping into the accent of
A tenement Catholic
Who brawls over gruel,
Who wanders over a brick-strewn lot
Where the tobacconist’s burned down.
Where the indigent defeated now
Fuck like choleric bears.
A name like that means
You weren’t fated to greatness
But to rankest survival,
By dint of knuckled guts.
But enough of that.
Shall we alight from safe places,
Have too much absinthe
and insult a colonel?
Who needs a heart
When you’ve got a spleen
With a vena cava?
We’ll promise to bury you
At Druid Ridge, but only if you promise
Not to outlive that snarl.
For your pecker is a grinder’s wheel.
For your balls are a civil war.
But this, Boileryard,
This is a hymn.
Mark again,
a rising and daring,
a burning without exhaustion,
a heat with dangerous form,
not like the fire without an end,
but the coals, under the ashes and warm.
A mark from before,
a promise unkept,
a hero unkempt.
A man seen only in white and red and blue —
the same still, but now in red and blue and white,
all shades different, but not askew.
Our prior notation,
a classic tale,
a useful trope.
Kerry Wood ended with a K.
Bartolo Colon just kept going.
And now what will remain?
I’m telling you, Simmons, those days!
Those days when we finally began turning away …
Your tresses plunged like the
Bellwether economic indicators of the day.
Like the necklines of those
Who tottered for your notice.
We shan’t survive these times, said wartime leaders!
We shan’t survive Ted Simmons
and his unmade-bed hair!
Sacco him before he Vanzetties us!
You, you catcher and framer, hitter and blocker!
Michigan man! Prince of quick wrists!
Needler of Herzogs! Merchant of dinnertime perils!
Tilter at windmills!
Tilter of pinball machines!
Holy bewitcher!
We were something, you and I! But mostly you …
We’d have made your hair the president if we could’ve.
But if elected it will not serve.
Which is the thing about things
Sourced from the womb of a Cumulonimbus.
That hair flows like beaded doorways granting wide berth to tall men!
It flows like riverine sperm heaven-bent on impregnating the 1950s!
As reliably as liquor drunkens,
So too do you!
O, feral wilding!
O, Simba!
Five english-language “Haiku” (the 5-7-5 / elementary school variety) inspired by these photographs of baseball players. Pictures from the endlessly beautiful Library of Congress archive.
A woman in the
bleachers just fell deep in love
with his follow-through.
Read the rest of this entry »
Let us throw up at a ballgame, you and I.
Collars high, gents!
Wangs paraded, cavaliers!
Our testicles are covered with moss and lichen.
This is because they are boulders.
So let us throw up at a ballgame, you and I.
We enslave what we do not kill.
We cuddle with hookers in secret.
We do not visit places so much as we colonize them.
Pregnancies! Muzzle-loading weaponry! Crests on jacket breasts!
Yes, let us throw up at a ballgame, you and I.
Cannonade sex perpetrated with a buccaneering urgency!
Begin each day with a fresh haircut!
Solaced by the species difference between us and the middlebrow remainder!
Phalli forever as crisp as apples!
Lo, doughty brothers, let us throw up at this and every ballgame.
I am less runner gaining purchase on inches,
Scant toe-breadths of this game’s soil, the color of punished citrus,
Than I am boat, loosed from moorings and set adrift,
Pushed away from the dock by a careless hand.
A hand that grasps nothing, least of all you.
On my dumbed feet of mud and oatmeal,
I am left to your vacant mercies.
Your leg doesn’t lift from its considered hinge and hang in half-freeze.
Rather, it slides askance and your arm lurches and rises
Like a grouse flushed from brush.
It is quick despite its heavy power to decide heavy things.
And here I am, lost in tangled heaven.
So stop being a dick and pitch the ball.
Today’s edition of The Found Poems comes from WTMJ’s April 20th broadcast of Colorado at Milwaukee. All words courtesy Mr. Bob Uecker.
Robin Yount
Great Brewers shortstop
and center fielder.
A Hall of Famer
who’s listening
to our broadcast tonight,
I know he is.
He and his little
transistor radio,
sitting in the driveway,
locked out again.
Here’s a poem with a line by Pat Listach — the line itself from an inspirational bookmark (embedded to the left and embiggenable).
Easy payday loan? More like skeezy payday loan, amirite?
Seriously, folks. Thank you. You’re too kind. Seriously.
For my next joke, I’d like to work with children for a living.
Consider: “In school, it’s not how fast you read; it’s how much you learn.” — Former Rookie of the Year Pat Listach.
Pat Listach: in one moment, eating at the city’s best restaurants; in the next, dying alone at a sanitarium in 1917.
Credit to my colleague Robert J. Baumann for making a present of the bookmark.
