Boys With Bats-Poem

BOYS WITH BATS By Jasen Sousa


They don’t understand our obsession with bats.
We scavenge through city streets,
look for our weapons of choice.
We scour through garbage,
leave barrels lying on their sides,
high-five upon their demise.
We raid abandoned buildings
and throw rocks through small square panels
of muck covered glass for practice.

We find hockey sticks, lead pipes and tree limbs
to go along with brooms we swiped from our parents.
Grinning young craftsmen sawing down sticks to our liking.
We blow away dust and tape both ends,
leave plenty of room to choke up.
We bring spray paint
to make sure everyone knows their way home.

We enter the park,
cigarette smoke
and foul language follows us.
Sagging fences surround, we splash
through puddles and crush lonely grass
that grows from cracks in the concrete.
We dress in our specific street colors
and wait to see if any other neighborhood kids
are up for a challenge.

Maybe it’s true what everyone says about us
being hoodlums and thugs.
With our bats, backwards caps, socks up to our knees,
beaters showing off our tats and crucifixes
dangling around our skinny necks.
But today, we are baseball players.

Taken from the book Humming Eternity by Jasen Sousa