Found Poetry: Pauly Shore Edition

I’m never one to enjoy others laughing behind my back, so when troublemaker Dayn Perry put forth a spurious Pauly Shore quote recently, I determined to find the actual source of the quote. Why? Well, when Carson Cistulli found out I didn’t know Vin Scully’s name, he mocked me publicly for weeks and garnished my wages.

I figured the quote was not indeed that of Pauly Shore, but it seemed old-timey enough to be real and possibly important, so I — as every good investigator does in Step 1 — opened a Google and searched:

“I once thought this game of base ball to be something paltry — a trifling, a merest emanation. Yet, lo, across my years I have learned that the end of the base-ball season is as redolent of death, of foreordained annihilation, as the vicar’s withered corpse.”

Which led me to happen upon this:

It doesn’t take a word wizard to see I had stumbled onto something both very poetic and very frightening.

Obviously I didn’t click on the page — my computer has enough angry, Russian viruses as it is — but I think we can all agree I had seen enough. Slicing in a few words and non-sequiters here and there, and BOOM! we’ve a James Joyce poem:

e-at-- --gry
… ball field ball game
         ball of fire
                  ball over

ball up ball valve ball-park
         where daddy took me tuesdays
… base base 64 base metal base-court
         baseball baseball bat baseball player
                  sign the ball! sign the ball!

…… dead dead beat
         dead code dead end
                  dead ground dead hand
dead head dead horse ……
daddy’s gone, season’s gone
…… dead dead beat
         dead code dead end

year leaped
         leaper leapfrog
lost time with the goldmine
                  leaping leapt lear learn learnable
learned …

daddy never left
         he was here at the
… ball field ball game
         ball of fire
                  bawl over

NOTE TO THE READER: My father is fine and well and is neither dead nor haunting a ballpark.