‘There are so many damaged birds,’ he said, spreading jam on his sourdough toast. 

‘I haven’t seen that many,’ I said. 

‘Well, I have,’ he said. ‘And I was just too tired to do what we did for that seagull.’

I don’t have any goals except to make the reader think and feel. What they think and feel is up to them. 

On the way home from picking up my brother at the airport, I stopped for a hitchhiker. I’d never picked up a hitchhiker before. I think I did it because my brother was with me, Julian. It was the kind of thing Julian would do.

We’ll have more in common than you’d think—after all, we’re both main sequence stars, I’m just a few million years ahead of you. 

In the afternoons, I stripped off my boyish clothing and watched back to back episodes of Saved by the Bell, feeding my unhealthy obsession for Kelly KAPOWski. The perky brunette with her slim ankles and come-hither hair tosses was the ultimate teenage bombshell. 

Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.

It means nothing now but it meant enough then, enough to change a life, to alter the smooth rhythmic turning of the world. 

What can be said about this game that hasn’t already been said about Christmas morning? Better than that. The first day of a summer break. Better than that. Evening fireworks on the 4th of July. That, too. Better than all. A graduation, an engagement, a marriage, a festival, a celebration. An outdoor fete to anything.

He doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t want any.

That’s the only way Mays can pitch, 

because he doesn’t play the game 

of fraternity formed on summer ballfields. 

Vin Scully alone in a broadcast booth, talking by himself, talking to us. Assuring the world that all’s well in Dodgeralia. Calm. Composed. At home, in a park he’ll depart at season’s end. Handpicking his words, off endless branches, branches’ branches, in a deep memory he builds, maintains over many years, keeps polished like a jewel.

Oscar kisses the child through the hard mesh fence designed for the fans’ protection.  He does not like kissing his boy through hard mesh.   

How fucking weird is the knuckle ball?

I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.

I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.

The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me. 

Signals

When dead whales wash up on your shores,
it's not your insult to heaven, nor your fifteen-

        foot song carried

                       by high tide into flushing

The parents come home tired, they come home smiling, they come home angry, they come home drunk.

soliciting chimps / in the shit cage

He can’t respond to the man addressing him as Mr. Sport because he can’t talk, his tongue has been mangled, somewhat ineptly, and he sees the hilarity in this, being tortured by inept torturers, as another larger silent gentleman’s behind him, but if it weren’t him in the chair, if it were someone else and he was watching, he might be amused by these two dilettantes practicing the art of torture.

& spread / my arms out / like a giant squid