At the Bat

It's always struck me as one of the great tragedies of the last decade in online writing that Modern Humorist didn't survive.  For those of you not familiar with the publication, still, fortunately, mostly archived on the web, it was like a more literate version of The Onion, but much less vain than McSweeney's, a place that published literary giants' (fake) letters to Britney Spears, invented a hilarious Taliban stand-up comic, and mashed up Harry Potter and Dave Eggers to excellent effect.  It was like reading products engineered to hit certain very precise points on New York's approval matrix.  I miss it so, so much.  But one of my favorite features was the Holy Tango of Poetry, poems with titles that are anagrams of famous poets' names, written in their styles.  It was genius.  And in honor of the first of the baseball season, I just have to direct y'all towards this one:





DHby H.D.
DH, rend open the ball,
rip apart the seams,
bash it to pieces.
Pitchers can't hit
in the AL—
you are better than the pitcher
that chokes up and bunts
and runs pell-mell
yet rounds no base.

Hit the ball—
plough through it,
cleave it with the Ginsu knife
of your bat.