There are advantages to learning to clutch with your left hand, and shift with your left foot. You might have the opportunity of riding down a gravel scree near the sacred beach in central Java, girlfriend on the back, wondering if at the bottom it would be a gradual recovery, or an abrupt conclusion; or you might be able to escape the teeming lost/party scene in Goa, to dodge cattle and wild pigs and dogs, to wiggle your head greeting to the locals, and to look out over bicentennial portuguese ruins at the Indian ocean… ah, where you might go, if you could ride a motorcycle…
MOTORCYCLE & I
the men who sell insurance know
I am as good as dead
as a man with eighty years
who questions every morning
Is this sun my last?
and sleeps each night
his mouth an Oh
my friend who shouts am I crazy knows
and the woman who watched me ride away
no helmet! at night!
how much I want to die
under the yellow canopy light
the zebra/city lights
the mist tastes
like a cool drink at my lips
like lemonade
I could be on a coalcar
rolling toward the last rail
on a corked volcano
which rumbles like an engine
I might be the sort of man
would make a wall
of some car’s misdirection
the insurance men know
this mist thickens, taps
my forehead, falls in drops:
now I am safe
as a man of eighty-two.
I see the freeway, my right hand
opens the throttle
the rain lowers its head
like a bull, horizontal
its sharp horns teasing
the hundred nerves of my cheek
my boots become a sponge’s squeeze
my jeans, blue glue
the cars beside me know
they don’t make ’em with brains these days
that’s sure
laughing while the rain plays my teeth
waving at the dry families
a roar in the wet night
when I die it should be like this
just out of breath, smiling
like a child coming in from the storm
did you feel that rain!
– Jul 1987 Minneapolis, MN
“In the rain” by Ex-Driver @ DeviantArt.com
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011