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.

Stumpy and Poetry Dice, from Poetry Lincolnton reading

out take from Rough Beast

Larry’s Pragma 33

Since nobody knows what Jesus looked like,
You can make up whatever you want,
Blue-eyed, dreamy, speaker of perfect English.
I’ve been here and there and studied on it
A bit, heard my brother’s pronunciations,
And I have closed my eyes and mumbled
Drunken prayers, and I have felt something
Cold pass through me when a man expired,
And I have felt something lift from my shoulders
When there was nothing there to see,
And I have looked long at my hairy reflection
In rivers and mirrors, and thought that maybe
Just maybe Jesus looked a lot like me.

More Hoe Boy Poems

Hoe Boy Joins the Church of Death

The old man had radar,

eyes that cut through lies,

a voice that loved and hewed,

encouraged, and accused,

a heart that yearned and ached,

and when he died, the son's

relief outweighed the pain,

and he wondered, because

he was alive and could,

if it was always that way,

the bonds that death breaks

so the next can run

more freely for a while

toward the reaper's cold embrace.

Boston 2013

With Eric Harrison at the Great Fenway Park Writers Series in Boston, August 2013

Rough Beast

Rough Beast, a new book of poems by Tim Peeler will be published by Future Cycle Press in the Summer of 2014.  RB is a mostly first person account that follows the fortunes of Larry Ledbetter, a small-time southern gangster who after a stretch in a regional prison becomes a celebrated poet.