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!