Fantasy Baseball

To speak first

Is to speak out of turn

To speak, first

You must open your mind

With your mouth

Without breathing it

Keeping it in

For hundreds of syllables

By which you mark time.

When the spheres were our cartels

We could do whatever we wanted

Now they orbit the moon

Of diminishing return

And when it is noon

On that gnomic orb

Hands full of lilies

Vanish under the sundial

And a venial rain

Falls slowly on it.

And when the spheres were our cartels

We began to speak

Of diminishing return

Without breathing it

Slowly filling the vein

With hundreds of syllables

That rhyme with blood.

To speak first

You must open the eye

In your mind’s eye

Out to the edge of

A bodily bound

To keep marking time

Until it is noon

On another sphere

Where hands filled with litter

Cover the lilies

And a grass house

Is deemed fitter for flourishing

There a virginal rain

Fills the vein slowly

Without bursting it

And marks time.

I was born with a gun to my head

And a face made of glass.

I was stone once

Before they made me.

I was made of the world’s gravy

That a god sopped up with a crust

And tasted of and ate, and was ashamed.

I was born in a grass house

Out to the edge of

Town (this would have been

Before the city succumbed

To the wicked sons

And the streets became veins

Filled with red syllables).

I put a gun to my head

And marked time.

I was a stone once

Before they made me

Do it.

I put the phone to my mouth

Without breathing in.