Baseball (Annotated)

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/k/kinsebo01.shtml

Maybe I wanna talk about class inequality
or mapping the surface of Mercury.
Old Man Poem, here, he can give a flying so and such
about teeth lining the inner cheeks of koalas,
or the 500-percent rise of student loan debt.
He won't turn down Scully,
but he might pause mid-Arnold Palmer
if you tell him telegraph operators once unplugged
their batteries and chatted
for an evening without power
save that from an aurora borealis
so grand Jose Marti saw it.
But my poem tongues a lemon seed
and remembers M.V.Puig,
how a 12th-inning right field substitution
could electrify a stadium.
He gets bored when I try rhyme,
says he prefers Lord Huron to my slanted drone.
Fine, Poem! That’s just fucking fine!
How will I ever cause the change I desire?
How to garner support for universal healthcare
or a living wage, more funding for public schools,
for me the arts, for NASA?
My poem can’t believe I spent four lines complaining,
says he has plenty of time, but less space,
and I better get back to baseball,
how a Chattanooga Lookout once struck out
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig,
how she made all the papers,
even though it may have been a stunt.
(Not that baseball minds a myth;
he’s told my poem as much
from the Doubleday dugout.)
Facts matter
as much as a lemon seed
in the mouth of a poem
crushed to ashy white.
Ha! I cast Kanye power to help it sprout:
roots reach from my poem’s fundament
through the gray weather porch
and guvment soil
while a trunk busts
from mouth through overhang
branches rip off shingles,
leaves trifurcate the new shade
over my dessicated poem
and we’re both showered
in samaras he’d call helicopters.