Baker's Mountain Pome

 

Abel’s Unsettled Nostalgia

 

When he turned out the lamp in his house

There was nothing but the gun lights so bright

You could see them ten miles west in Valdese.

He’d sit on a chair and watch Mountain View

Beyond the Romanian vampires

On the east slope in their mini-mansions,

Dark corpuscle of 127,

Pickup trucks and SUVs driving down

Toward the shallow Jacob Fork River,

Meandering by the Huffman hog farm

And the Huffman recreation center

Where his kids had once played little league ball,

Games he was sometimes fool enough to coach.

He ruminated over his mistakes

In games that played endless in his nightmares.

He wanted baseball but his kids moved on

To track and soccer, and then cross country.

SABR article on William Dummy Hoy

https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/William-Hoy/?fbclid=IwAR2w7WvV-XgkXF5RQcsqboKch5yyAAZhituUy6r7lk_ZQfZjzvwfRO7BXAQ 

New Year's Res 2024

 

New Year’s Resolution

 

I’m only going to write

When I have something to say

When the tumblers turn

Till they fall into place

And I twist the doorknob

Till there’s a crack of light

Or dark showing through

The opening and I hold my breath

For just a moment, waiting

For the joy or the sorrow,

The bullet or the tender rush.

Possible cover for new book of poems from Red Dirt Press.  Coming early summer, 2015.

Baseball Apostate

Baseball Apostate

IT was the most brutal form of rebellion,

Denying the old man, after thousands

Of hours spent as a side yard battery

As the boy grew taller and stronger

And the pitches more dangerous,

Sometimes intentionally so

That the old man’s shins purpled

And he even considered giving it up,

Paying the high school catcher 

From down the street to sit on

His bean pickin chair, but the Lord

Had told him to teach his son to pitch

And he always listened to the Lord

Even when the Lord asked for crazy things.

The afternoon the boy told him on the ride home

From school, the old man couldn’t talk

At first, and the boy knew that his pitches

Could only hurt if he refused to throw them.

Full Cover, Now Available through Future Cycle Press and Amazon.

Old Man Poems

Old Man Poems

It was the year I hit
A blackjack home run in June
And the cab drivers that gambled
Out by left field brought me
A shoe box half full of dollar bills.
Nights I wasn’t chasing something else,
I’d go home to the house we’d rented
On the mountain, and she’d fetch beers
To the back porch where we’d watch
The lights across the valley
And I’d tell her the lie I’d told ten years,
How we were gonna make it to the show.
But the Class D was all too easy:
The daddy spanked Baptist town girls,
The one pitch country farm hands,
And though my swing busted everything,
My boyfriend shot left foot staggered me,
Caged me, destroyed my soul.
Class D, and the D stood for despair.