Last Poem Before Zoloft
Is that an ink pen or a bullet?
I can’t tell, you know how long
Are some of those shells.
I see a teenaged boy child
Listening to “Any Major Dude”
Thinking of when to come out.
Outside the rain drums
The triple pane basement window.
Inside a half-crippled black lab
Watches a baseball game.
I ran through what seemed like
An ocean of time to get here
To find myself invisible.
The ages will be the ages
As the rat snake snugs himself
Around the water pipe in the crawlspace.
What do you mean, how will we go on?
We will wear goggles.
We will carry spears.
About the Author: A past winner of the Jim Harrison Award for contributions to baseball literature, Tim Peeler has also twice been a Casey Award Finalist (baseball book of the year) and a finalist for the SIBA Award. He lives with his wife, Penny in Hickory, North Carolina, where he directs the academic assistance programs at Catawba Valley Community College. He has published close to a thousand poems, stories, essays, and reviews in magazines, journals, and anthologies and has written sixteen books and three chapbooks. He has five books in the permanent collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, NY. His recent books include Rough Beast, an Appalachian verse novel about a southern gangster named Larry Ledbetter, Henry River: An American Ruin, poems about an abandoned mill town and film site for The Hunger Games, and Wild in the Strike Zone: Baseball Poems, his third volume of baseball-related poems.
More By Tim Peeler:
Ballers 2, the Star’s Monologue 3
Image Credit: Robert Shymanski: “Attic, crawl space, view east and southeast from north center (part 1 of triptych view) – Hegeler Carus Mansion, 1307 Seventh Street, La Salle, La Salle County, IL”(2008) The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 