Listening to
“Goodbye Porkpie Hat”
in a baseball field
where I played.
I sit late at night.
I watch ghosts
play baseball.
I am not
scared of ghosts.
I was but then
I saw ghosts
play baseball.
I just watched
and learned the game.
They played it like
a piano player,
a jazz singer,
an astronaut.
That’s the way
they played baseball.
They stuck to the rules
like a low caliber
hanging fruit, and I know
that strange fruit
Nina meant was not meant
for ghosts to understand
because ghosts
understand everything.
One ghost liked to
pinch up on the bat,
and the catcher caught
like Tony Pena.
They had fun
but kicked the sand
like Billie Marten.
I watched the ghosts
like a fan of them,
but not the game.
They liked to rally
around the 7th inning,
and I remember the stars
during that stretch,
and a ghost and I
got into it
about something stupid.
he left verklempt,
but i was satisfied
enough with the outcome.
Those kind of things
happened alot, until
they started letting
the ghost kids in to play.
I never could quite
understand the ghost kids,
and always felt bad for them,
but one day i saw
a ghost kid I recognized.
“Mike?
Mike Burns?”
He looked like
he had seen a ghost.
Jason, Jason Wright?
Wow, its really good to see you.
“Yeah Mike, its been a long time.
You died like when you were nine, right?”
He might have been older.
In fact, he was older.
He corrected me,
Actually Jay,
it was the end of 8th grade.
I apologized to him
for dedicating
“The Wind Beneath My Wings”
to Michelle Duclos,
and that I should have let the kids
dedicate it to him.
He had tons of friends.
He said, I was too sick
to even realize it man, I was dying.
I told him that I realized
that level of understanding
when I went through my step 4
and then Mike said something to me,
So what did I miss?
I thought about it for a second,
and was like “You missed a lot.
Columbine, Woodstock 99, and then 9/11.”
After I told him that
he was like
Jesus what else?
And then I went on to say
that a policeman knowingly
took the life of a black man
after being on his chest for 8 minutes.
He said, Jesus why would he do such a thing?
And I said I asked Jesus the same thing.
Mike likes to play pitcher
on the days that I stay at the field.
I don’t know if whether
it was baseball, or the ghosts,
or knowing one of the ghosts,
but I am no longer afraid of them.
In fact, one day maybe
I will play alongside them.
Jason Wright is the editor and founder of Oddball Magazine. His column appears weekly. His third book, Train of Thought 2: Almost Home is available now at the Oddball Book Store.