Hey Pete

hey pete by Michael R. Burch hey pete, it's baseball season and the sun ascends the sky, encouraging a schoolboy's dreams of winter whizzing by; go out, go out and catch it, put it in a jar, set it on a shelf and then you'll be a Superstar. When I was a boy, Pete Rose was my favorite baseball player; this poem is not a slam at him, but rather an ironic jab at the term "superstar." Keywords/Tags: Baseball, Season, Boy, Schoolboy, Schoolchild, Student, Scholar, Winter, Spring, Sun, Catch, Star, Superstar, Jar, Pete Rose, Reds, Cincinnati, Big Red Machine, America, Fantasy, Humor, Hyperbole, Irony, Sports Unlikely Mike by Michael R. Burch I married someone else’s fantasy; she admired me despite my mutilations. I loved her for her heart’s sake, and for mine. I hid my face and changed its connotations. And in the dark I danced—slight, Chaplinesque— a metaphor myself. How could they know, the undiscerning ones, that in the glow of spotlights, sometimes love becomes burlesque? Disfigured to my soul, I could not lose or choose or name myself; I came to be another of life’s odd dichotomies, like Dickey’s Sheep Boy, Pan, or David Cruse: as pale, as enigmatic. White, or black? My color was a song, a changing track.