Bikes
(July 1969. For Mike Evans, 1953-2014)
We stood smack in the middle of summer, felt the minutes, hours, days flow down our skin. A crazy bunch of miles above, some man was set to trampoline about the moon and get himself misheard by history. The sun was our manor. We swung our bikes along its beams, its paths and cut-throughs, out across the molten ways of housing schemes, where peace begged for a chance from open doors and windows sang of pinball wizardry. No freedom for the man up on the moon, no change of gear or bush-grassed gulley. He was parked before the world, a black-white moth netted with one wing twitching. We roared on. He jumped stiff-legged, a toddler testing beds. We slicked our tyres with ancient oil. He coped as best he could with ice-white silence, left a flag to be unloved by July breeze. Did we feel autumn in our bones as we rode home, hear time complaining at the snow? Course not: we’d been bowling over fire, chasing sun-spots like rooks. Our transmissions were simple as a breath, joy to muscle to speed to joy to muscle—the right stuff. Meanwhile, beyond the day, the moon man tried to get back up a ladder as unsound as those our dads ascended, bulb in hand, mithering of expense and foreign tat, while far below our mothers gripped the rungs and tuned their minds’ dial elsewhere, to their times of joy, of speed and fire, endless sun.
Michael W. Thomas, from The Stations of the Day (Black Pear Press, 2019)
