Baseball

Carry the weight of the world in your hand, what a feeling
Defying gravity with murmurs of the make-belief
The showroom glissades in the penny arcade
I was kneeling
You played the base, I played the ball
I was the hunchback on your side
You married the mildew and gossamer under the skylight
You painted Japanese autumn fire maple trees and kites
Riparian meadows consumed by the death of a canvas
Now all the memories are coming back to life again

Back from the dead, the crowd is waiting in anticipation
Circus, bread and Bucky Harris on the television
Ducks on the pond, and Mrs. Truman with a black umbrella
And with a crack of the bat comes the main attraction:
Ayn Rand, Peter Pan and the ghost of Tully Sparks!
Deadpan, hidden hand - the pose of Karl Marx
Brass band plays a Star Strangled Banner in reverse
Batter up! it's baseball!
Paralyzed with joy, marching up the manor marble steps
You can see the gleaming pantaloons on the
frosted wedding cake anchored to your mind
"the party's over, everyone's leaving!"
See the jives and fisticuffs
Men and girls who came and went like moths
Harvesting your dreams of jitterbug flappers
As the penguin in the pit pushes you around

There's a choir in your mind that can tell you anything
But you can't always hear the voice that is worth remembering

Time is running out!

There must be some kind of way out of here
I traced the intersections everywhere
And in a time exposure I was shown a hidden message in the cobblestone
And then I woke up in a fevered hypertension
To a silent movie on imperial expansion
I put my head inside a padded leather glove just like a baseball
They picked a bullet from his mutilated shoulder
The son of Sisyphus, the pusher of the boulder
Stitched him together with a needle and a twine

Just like a baseball
I got his baseball!

You breathe the fragrance of your purple cigarettes
Stumbling through the ballroom of the blind
A tapestry of rocketships under salamander skies
Silhouettes of dinosaurs and cogwheels
Carry the weight of the world in your hand, what a feeling!

Now all the memories are coming back to life again
The crepuscular rays and the penny arcades and the kneeling
You were a domino collapsing like a highrise to the ground

Oh, what a night!
Can you feel the music?
Puerto Rican boys are dancing in the hall
Hey Chardonnay, lilac of the seasick!
I'm gonna take you from the brim to the dregs
Month of May, picnic with my best friends
A splendid tonic for my violent delirium
There's Hemingway!
My resident physician
Batter up!
I'm gonna take you to the moon!
It's baseball!