Well, this is a poem about baseball, fortunately
or unfortunately.
I don't know very much about baseball,
as you'll be able to tell from the poem.
And I'm not even sure I like baseball that much.
But I wanted to write a poem for a friend of mine
who loves baseball.
And so I said, well, I'll try.
And I got interested in the difference
between mitts and gloves.
This is going back.
This shows how much I don't know about contemporary baseball
because I'm sure that in contemporary baseball,
every position has its own specially designed glove.
But when I was a child, there was the catcher's mitt
and there was the first baseman's mitt.
And then everybody else wore the same kind of glove.
So I wrote about it as if that was still the case.
I don't know what the contemporary case is.
It's called "Mitts and Gloves."
And it sort of takes you takes us
through the entire team and talks
about what can fill this glove, what can fill the mitt.
"Mitts and Gloves."
"The catcher holds a kangaroo fetus in his.
The first basemans grips a portable hair blower.
But everyone else just stares into theirs,
punching a fist into it, stomped,
trying to come up with a proper occupant.
The pitcher, for example, thinks a good stout padlock
would go right in there.
But the left fielder, perhaps influenced by his environment,
opts for a beer can.
The shortstop, informative about the ratio of power to size,
says, transistor, you know, radio.
The second baseman however, he just stands and grins
and flapjacks his from hand to hand and back again.
Second base, dopey as always.
Alas, cried third baseman, this void of vacancy,
pure space beyond our defiant emptiness.
Abyss haunted by the kiss of balls we have not missed.
O ab-sontz, deh-lease...
The right fielder is disgusted at this.
He like snorts, hawks, spits into his and curses her.
Look, heck, my chaw of tobac fits it perfeck.
The team goes mum, cowhided by the rectitude
of his position, the logic.
Only the center fielder who was going back
while this discussion was going on,
putting jets on his cleats to catch the proverbial long one.
Does he perhaps have a suggestion?
Question mark.
As for the ball, often midair, it all dreamily scratches
its stitches and wonders what it will look like tomorrow,
when it wakes up and the doctor removes his bandages.
Coda.
Mitts versus gloves.
Mitts are white collar, high tech, specialists, pro,
and therefore worthier?
The glove on the other hand, human,
and can be worn interchangeably by all players,
is dirty, low down, dumb.
I'm forced to admire the mitt, but free,
in theory, to love gloves."
[APPLAUSE]
As you can see, I don't know much about baseball.