Motorcycle & I
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
