The Red Sox
are about to win the World Series.

Ads and excitement and billboards and mouths
are all bubbling over in every Boston cafe, bar, and street

but you make a show of how you didn’t know
this was going on because 

you never watch TV, you don’t watch the sportsball,
you don’t watch the news, you don’t see the papers.

Is it still going on? That must explain those hooligans.
Such things are ten miles beneath your consideration.

I believe you believe this, I believe it’s all true — 
much as I believe in the moon fairies of Lingur.

You live in Boston, the Red Sox
are about to win the World Series, and you didn’t know?

Nothing overheard in the street,
no friends who care for the sportsball?

No one at work has mentioned it at all?
No customer, no client? No bus driver, no neighbor?

Hell of a bubble you’ve got for yourself, there.
Hell of a thing that you don’t need to notice the world

you’re in, or even the one next door
to yours.  Hell of a thing and hard to swallow

that not an ounce of whisper of this
has reached you at all.  

I think you’re just trying
to make a point

that you don’t care for baseball.
I can get with that — I don’t really either —

but I know enough of what’s going on around me
that I can speak of it to people who aren’t like me,

but if what you are saying
is in fact true,

if your vaunted and loudly proclaimed
distance from the day to day is true,

I’m frightened of you.  If it’s true
your detachment scares me to death. 

You live in Boston,
the Red Sox are about to win the World Series, 

and you’ve got a life so well-sealed
that nothing you dislike ever leaks in.

Somewhere in that detachment I detect
a echo that suggests that others eat cake,

an echo of the ultimate detachment:
the whistle and wet thunk of a guillotine.

Do you see yourself standing beside it, or kneeling behind it?
Are you the target or the mob?  Which position

will your detachment gain you
on the day the dirty world at last leaks in?

You live in Boston. The Red Sox are about to win
the World Series.  Take heart: 

soon enough everything will fall back into its place,
like a head falling into a basket.