Paranoid reflections
Another (very short) poem that began on Twitter and was reworked when I realized that the last line was, by mistake, a total lipogram.
I get defensive next to those who don’t know they’re unlike me
Turning my cheek before they see how close they come to strike me.
No blood is drawn so I think that should work out, good and dandy.
But I don’t know if I’m too proud or too much of a pansy.
Twitter poem–expanded
Sometimes I Tweet in rhymed couplets. Usually just, like, four lines at a time. More cryptic than specific.
Today I started doing that. Then it kind of grew. And grew. Until the point (I’ll leave it to you to guess which) where I was like “no, this is too much for other people’s news feeds/enough for a blog post.”
I still say “bleep no” in my head and wince
Without movement. Though it has been years since
I took you seriously, didn’t laugh.
In spite of all of this, gaffe after gaffe.
How often does a generation splinter
But reform after mourning in the winter?
Or, how crowded was my bandwagon stop
Subtracting out for everyone who’d drop
Off in the years to follow, years of loss?
Every pause, every station, there’s a cross,
An intersection, way to transfer off.
There is no shortage of reasons to scoff.
Sometimes we blow a lead. We sigh. We rage.
Sometimes the newsmakers make the front page.
We roll our eyes with distance and with shame,
Far more then when we lose another game.
Another question I haven’t quite reckoned.
Why do I feel the need to write in second
Person? Two lines per rhyme and three per tweet.
The hemiola pushes me on, feet
By feet. On the one hand, I can disguise
Specifics with “yous” instead of the “I”s.
It’s like a trite love song with a trite chorus.
For people like me, the same lyrics bore us.
But if I say some you has made me sad,
It’s so generic that everyone’s had
Something similar, even if distinct.
But when our thoughts are trendy enough, linked,
Then all the world is saying the same thing.
And what more use can my tossed-off words bring?
I don’t want to be a bandwagon-rider;
At least when I’m an absolute outsider
I know no fellow fans will speak for me
And get me wrong. But who is left to be?
A generation fades into the past
Step by stop. Someone has to come in last
Be the end of that season, of that group.
Of course, in Chicago, the train lines loop.
Elegy II?
I keep forgetting that the New York Times
Is from New York. Or that New York exists
With fans and bandwagon-hoppers. It lists
The teams in order. (“Pittsburgh Pirates”): gets
The full names listed. But “Yankees” and “Mets”
Since they’re the locals. In the St. Paul Press,
Everything but the Twins are spelled out, yes.
I got used to that living near St. Paul.
The paper was local, the city small.
In my mind’s eye, the baggies still hide seats
Only taken down for Vikings defeats.
The indie scorecards and the makeshift drums.
“No smoking in the Metrodome.” It comes
Back now in fits and starts. The game delayed
So that some college football could be played.
The comebacks and the awesome pitching there.
Kicking you out the door, the rush of air…
The Times aren’t changing now, so much, although
I move between cities, I come and go.
To the extent the Vikings cross my mind
It’s schadenfreude, nothing very kind.
I can’t truthfully say I care where they
Have their home games. Not like I watch them play.
But hidden there on the back page it’s shown;
Dayton signs, Dome to crash. I wish I’d known.
Liberal Arts
Arithmetic is a liberal art
Where all the rest of the statistics start.
Runs, hits, and errors. Averages. Fractions.
A boiling down of long hours of actions.
Memorizing records they thought would last.
Counting up to them…and then counting past.
So was geometry. Ninety feet square;
Sixty feet, six inches. Pentagons, there.
The distances to left-center and right
The arc of a parabola in flight.
Pythagorean “caught stealings.” The shift
As sunlight or as fielders slowly drift.
And music. “Take me out to the ballgame”
Makes sense on TV (we’re not those who came)!
The melody leading up to the “charge!”
A place for many to sing on a large
Scale. Even anthems, sigh or groan,
Have found a way to call the field their own.
Astronomy (not just the Houston type):
To gaze at stars in green cap or pinstripe,
To classify them and predict who’s next
Even if things don’t go as one expects
To play under the lights, have some eclipse
Of newcoming talent, cheer on your lips.
These were the quadrivium. Yet there’s more;
Grammar was one subject that came before,
The simple linkups of fielder and base,
The schematics with everything in place.
The count, the swing, the hit. The strike. The ball;
No wonder it might be first of them all.
Logic. Decisions on the field of play;
To pinch-hit here? To bunt or swing away?
To try the long ball? Play for ninety feet?
Looked back on, criticized after defeat,
Forgotten in the wake of victory,
With everything else swirling giddily.
And rhetoric. The DH, pro or con?
Are the good days still here, or have they gone?
Williams or Ruth? Or Bonds? How to compare?
Is there any metric that’s really fair?
What might different statistics have revealed?
When will our announcers look at the field?
But now the random questions one responds
To are more pointed than “Pujols or Bonds?”
It’s “do you recognize this obscure gem”?
If not, “so, why haven’t you heard of them?
You only follow MLB, as if
It was some “major league”? A swing and whiff!
There are other leagues, you short-sighted fool!
Oh what do they teach at your old-time school!
And I don’t just mean “A League Of Their Own.”"
So while I, yes, have heard of Toni Stone,
I don’t feel like this line of questions suits.
These aren’t your normal trivium pursuits.
That Game
Even Copernicus was only brave
Enough to publish once he looked back
And saw his ideas had been seen before.
Since then, they say, we don’t feel special anymore.
Can’t tell the history we’re living through.
And I was impressed how the adults knew.
At least tragedies are known at the time.
We have scripts for them, formulas, stock speeches.
The comedies, I suppose, in the Shakespearean sense,
When they’re not weddings, or at least not our own,
Perhaps fall into formulas and stocks.
And don’t we watch games because they’re fun?
Someday perhaps I’ll watch it all again.
Perhaps with a book open in front of me,
Or at this rate a screen.
Perhaps someday I’ll see it start to end
Perhaps with more commentators behind
Or just try to remember that long night.
The computers were almost fast enough.
So many stats laid at our fingertips.
That as we watched all of their leads forsake them
We’d calculate the odds in time to break them.
Perhaps this night won’t end; it’s too dramatic.
The announcers are prattling and I’m
Hearing it clear as day. There is no static
And I am still up, far past my bedtime.
Another commercial break, or dead air
Or inane words–does no one know the scope
Of this game or does no one really care?
Another run comes in, a chance, a hope.
But hours pass before they really have
Something to scream about. And then they scream.
I do not jolt awake, but jolt aware;
Since to get through the night that will not end,
I turn back to the night that seemed not to.
It is four or five in the morning,
As many months since the season ended,
And I still cannot fall asleep.
The Squirrels
Busy rhyming (and other things) offsite, but inspiration struck me today. Looking forward to getting more sportsy in the spring…well. “Spring.” As it were.
It looks like squirrels died here.
A family below the trees, in a grassy line;
Large and small and brown and gray.
Their futile claws dig still into the dirt,
So the city’s winds do not touch them.
Zomibified grass surrounds them
But there they stand still…
I blink and they are all that’s left
Of yesterday’s snow. It is February
And winter has never come to stay.
Giants 21, Patriots 17
I don’t remember how many football fields I’ve ever seen. I could come up with a decent guess for in-person, but what about over the screen?
They are standardized, the white yard lines (which never, from my seat, look a yard apart, always more like feet) drawn on top of the green.
I’ve stood on a long but narrow lawn, and tried remembering (“How far away were you from the stage? Imagine a football field.”) And although
I know they’re supposed to be a unit, when it comes down to gauging with them in my head, I have to shrug and say “No, I don’t really know.”
But after misused timeouts allow the clock to tick along at what is for football an unusually clockesque pace, the last drive comes at last.
They zoom out. And though I don’t care who wins, the distance from the fifty-yard line or somewhere to the endzone has never looked so vast.
Dying fish
Shall I compare you to a dying fish
That flops amid wet glass and gasps in air?
On reflection, that would not be my wish.
I think that the comparison’s unfair.
For fish are fit when water wraps their gills
But water blurs you till you’re beyond use.
For you it is not open air that kills
But in a puddle, you lie soaked and loose.
Destruction for the hope of gain, I guess
Can once in a while be justified.
But at observing you, I must confess
The shards and puddle leave me stupefied.
Why would have someone broken glass for thee,
Oh newspaper that was already free?
Based on certain of yesterday’s events, although coincidentally not the Iowa caucus
I met a traveler from an ancient time.
Translation was tricky, far from her home
But we bonded over meter and rhyme
As she recited some forgotten poem.
She paged through an anthology I found.
We spoke of lines, and where a line should break.
We spoke of how a poem should look or sound;
What was a good start, what was a mistake.
She knew some odes to gems; pearl or obsidian,
That glittered, or had glittered in the past.
She read about ongoings more quotidian
From my peers. Well, her era couldn’t last.
“Did you–” I tried to say, “know more of truth?”
She left. I hid within a voting booth.
Iceberg
Shall I compare you to an icy floe
That floats atop a vast, enormous sea?
Upon reflection, the answer is “no”;
There are no penguins here, nor could there be.
They say eight-ninths of icebergs escape
Our eyes. We but glimpse one great piece of ice.
But below you’s another hue and shape.
I learned your different names. Do they suffice?
We sort by what is useful. What brings hail
Or gentle rain to nourish growing crops?
But I can’t help but wonder if words fail
To classify the hidden forms of tops.
Would wordsmiths have devised the same divides
If they could have looked at clouds from both sides?
