Blog Archives - Bulls Bard--The Verses

Game 30

12/31/2015

CHI 102 OT IND 100

Don’t forget:

We are still
The most perfect predator
The world has ever known.

Not because we have sharp claws
Or great speed
Or poisonous venom
Or impenetrable exoskeletons--

We don’t.

And it’s not that stuff
We do have,
Either.

The big brains or
The funny thumbs or
The ability to make tools out of bones
And houses out of cow shit.

And it’s not even because
We have mastered the mystic forces:
Fire and lightning.
Rock, paper,
And scissors.

What makes us so dangerous

Isn’t the how
But the
Why.

Few of us
Kill to eat.

We kill for pride.

We kill
To compensate.

Clawless and slow,
We make AK-47s
And Lamborghinis.

Who’s the lion now,
Lion?

We make poisonous venom
And pour it wherever-the-hell-we-want.
We cut down the forests
To build fortresses for us.

Our feelings of inadequacy
And powerlessness
Are the very source of our strength.

And it is guerilla warfare
Evolved.

We exploit our own weaknesses
Until weakness ferments
Into power.

#HoopsHaiku

Jimmy the Jedi
Willing and redirecting
Rather than shooting.

Game 29

12/29/2015

CHI 104 TOR 97
Basketball is Like Music - Part 1

Basketball is like music
In lots of little ways.

Here’s one:

Big fish leave small ponds.

The best players forever--
Neighborhood legends--
Leave their neighborhoods
To find their familiars.

And suddenly,
Most of them
Are not the best
Anymore.

They are regular sized fish
In regular sized ponds.

And for some of them
It’s devastating--

Mommy had told them
They were special,
And they had believed her.

For others, though,
It’s comforting--

A welcome relief
From the pressure
Of greatness.

A chance to be normal.

And for others still
It is fuel--

And they are racecars--
Revving their engines
And listening for

Go.

Game 28

12/27/2015

CHI 111 Dallas 118
Lessons from Dallas

#1
Visiting elderly relatives
Or sick friends
Is not about making them well
Or young,

It is about sharing time.

And time is the
Most precious resource
In the galaxy.

#2
It’s not about winning and losing.

It’s about making it home alive
And the people waiting there
For us.

Game 27

12/26/2015

CHI 105 OKC 96

We are all searching for something.

Regardless of our religion,
We look for perfection
And for purity
In a dirty world.

We need heroes.
We need to see a way out.

And we have learned
To believe in things--
To see things
That aren’t
Exactly
There.

We find ways
To have faith.

And testing that faith
Can make it stronger
And show us who we are.

But sometimes
We are wrong about things.

And in the end,
These heroes
We make
Are also people--

Capable of perfection and purity
But only in moments.

Flawed.
Just like the rest of us.

And while it can be infuriating as hell,

It’s also
The whole point.

#HoopsHaiku

Chicago breaks hearts.

She is beautiful
But cold

And never quite yours.

Game 26

12/22/2015

CHI 102 BRK 105

Jesseman
Came home
To build his mother a bathhouse.

High,
West-facing,
Wine-bottled wall.

So much light.
So much hope.

The opposite of the house beside it--

Neglected shack
In the Texas country
That Mom shared
With her two boys
Too long.

Cracked and leaning.
Struggle and resentment.

And the bathhouse kept growing.
It became a house house--
Spacious and elegant.

He would show me pictures
Proudly.

Doing this for the right reasons--
His mother.
And his big brother.
And himself.

This was a joyous act of redemption.

And then he completed it.

And in a bold symbolic gesture,
He moved anything worth keeping
Into the new house
And grabbed some matches
And a can of gas.

And he walked into his childhood home
One last time.

He hated this place.
Good riddance.

He stood outside,
Warmed and cleansed,
Watching the flames.

But fire is unpredictable--
Or maybe too predictable--
And sometimes flames
Meant for one thing
Do quite another.

I saw him
Right after it happened.
He smelled like smoke
And had soot on his face.

He had the strangest look in his eyes
As he explained it to me.

When the fire started to really roar
He had had a moment--

An oh shit moment.

He ran for the hose
And sprayed a circle
Around the new house.

Horror movie clumsy.

Panicked and useless
Like the last flurry
Of prey
Captured.

And then he relaxed
And found peace.

When inside-of-us fire
Becomes outside-of-us fire--
Actual fire--
Everything changes.

Meaning becomes truth.

And we no longer control it.
Or its symbolism.

Game 25

12/20/2015

CHI 91 NYK 107

I teach high school
English.

Seniors.
Eighteen, most of ‘em.

We read books
And tell stories
And talk about the world.

We connect our very real lives
To the lives of these fictional characters
And we see how on purpose
Art is.

We grapple with our humanity.

We try to figure out
What our experiences
And choices
Say about us
As human beings.

Where we fit.

We think about big things.

We discuss ideas
And disagree
And get excited.

It’s pretty cool.

But every year
There is at least one kid
Who tells me
I need to be more strict.

And I get it.

Certain people thrive within strict structures--
Swaddled in their rules and procedures.

But those structures will always be there
For them.

Or against them.

And they’ll only have me
For one short year.

#HoopsHaiku

We are all grenades,
And the pins are in our mouths.
Best we keep ‘em closed.

Basketball players
Can be artists or soldiers,
But are rarely both.

Game 24

12/19/2015

CHI 144 4OT DET 147

#1
After a certain number of punches

A fighter gets
Heavy handed.

His fists
Stop springing out
Invisibly
On their own

But work their way up--
Rippling through his body
As if summoned from the ground below.

Earthquake strong
And earthquake slow.

Defense disintegrates and
Outmaneuvering settles for outlasting.

Resting

While the next punch comes.

Leaning away and
Hoping it misses.

But hoping for something
Doesn’t make it so.

And somebody
Has to
Win.

#2
Everyone knew him
In the town-squares
Of Eskişehir.

Ersan the Silent
At his most serious and artistic--
Performances in the plazas
Before groups of business people
And theater-goers.

Silly-Asova
At children's parties,
Which were many--
For his bag of tricks
Is quite suited
To their sensibilities.

Or sometimes just
"That creepy mime."

But Falling Man
Was how most of us knew him--
Named for his favorite trick.

He would step into the path
Of some innocent passer-by
And fall--

Exaggerated mime expressions
Of disbelief.
Exasperation.
Sadness.

Tumbling down
And sprawling backwards
As if charged by a
Bull.

Game 23

12/17/2015

CHI 98 MEM 85

Two things are true
And the first is this:

The game is just a game.

Pure as it wants to be.

Rule-based
And honest,
No matter the audience
Or consequence.

Simple at its core
Despite its great complexity,

Like mathematics,
Or just about everything else.

But here is the second true thing:

The game is more than
Just a game.

Basketball has become other things for me.

My muse
And my connection.

The angel in the echo-chamber.

One story told endless times
Through endless voices.

And I listen for my own
Amongst them.
Straining
And leaning in.

The game itself
Slips into ideas
And gestures
And words.

Two things are true,
And they are true together.

They do not flicker on and off
Like a light.

They compress and rarefy
Like waves of sound
Or a pulsing heart.

Game 22

12/15/2015

CHI 115 PHI 96

Smart kid
They reassured my mother
Just doesn’t apply himself.

Disruptive and distracting
But very capable.

That’s what they said.

What they meant, though,was
I was a pain in the ass--
Hard to control.

Smart and volatile and impossible to steer.
A danger to myself and others.

And they were right.
Sort of.

The truth is
I didn’t apply myself--
Not like they meant.

Because
As kids
We are applied
Liberally
All over everything
By the slathered hands
Of bumbling blindmen.

So we close our eyes
And hold on tight
And if we’re lucky

We make it through.

And from there
We can start searching

For our selves
To apply.

Game 21

12/13/2015

CHI 98 NO 94

Three Short Poems About
Aaron Brooks and Redemption

#1

We exist within cycles.
Many of them.

Birth. Death.
Hunger. Satisfaction.
Love. Loss.

Failure.
Redemption.

The binary code
Of our programming.

The polar opposition
That holds us together.

The heads
And the tails.

And time is money--
Every second a spinning coin.

#2

A Man rides into town
On a black horse.

Alone.

A terribly flawed gunslinger
Swaying drunkenly
On a rickety rope-bridge.

On the thin wire of morality.

Charismatic and
Detestable.

Like Han Solo
Or Doc Holiday.

Wild West (comma),
America (period).

Good and bad
In the same breath.

#3

Nowhere but here
Am I this fast
To blame
And forgive.

Nowhere but here do I
Love so deeply
People I don’t even know.