Motorcycle Poem by Joshua SinclairThomson

Myopic irises
Glazed with briny tears
Gazed at the road ahead quivering.

A hollow of trees lay ahead,
Shadowy in the distance
Like a Subterfuge waiting

And the hillock
That materialised
Just before entering this:
Was like a
Portent devil
With
Boulder teeth
Grimacing.

Tunnelling canopies
Of tunnelling trees
Interwove
With the just before twilight blue
Of
A summer’s sky:
Intermingling forms
Blue and green
Like a vision of jazz,
Or a Jackson Pollock,
Or the resting after a day’s
Manual labour, when everything melts into one
Radiant
Mandala analogy.

There, there was no sound
Except for the cool
Exhilarating breeze
In my face
And the thud… thud… thud in my chest:

All
Rapido! Rapido!
Undulating,
Dissipating,
Until
Recognition of
Hands vibrating on handlebars,
And engines rattling,
And the U-shaped bend approaching
(As if it was a pair of moribund arms outstretching) -
Ready to greet me.


As I glimpsed this
I had less than a second remaining,
I could not avoid the crash,
And a psychotic burst of lucidity happened
In which I went into the third person.

There I saw
The quietus,
The darkness
And the angel of death, encroaching.

I saw it all in a movie theatre of my mind,
The film
Titled: Visions of Grandeur.

I crash-landed in the foliage
At 40mph…
It took her a while to forgive me for that,
I don’t blame her either,
It took me even longer to forgive myself.
So selfish, with her on the back,
What madness,
How lucky she wasn’t hurt…
I’d tried to make sure
As we went down
That she landed on top of me,
Which she did, and she was okay,
Only a few scratches here and there.
But her tears
Stifled the taste of godhead
And
Quickly
Quelled
The firework
That’d been combusting
In my
Chest.

I,
Then felt,
In the aftermath of that scene,
Like an abandoned and empty vessel,
Used unsympathetically
To house a fleeting and now dissipated
Holy vision!

Soon I realised I couldn’t feel my left leg,
I hoped at the time that it was broken
(How neurotic) ,
I wanted it to be, as a kind of punishment,
As a necessary branding,
Penitence, I should suffer and obligingly carry out without complaint.

And then a different kind of emptiness took hold,
A sense of utter loneliness,
Contempt and self-loathing,
A self-hating
And for months afterwards
Things flitted up and down like this.

But now I see it all so differently,
And I pity that child,
I wish I could go back to him and give him
(That stalwart boy
Who
Was
So beat up
Over his madness)
A good talking to, although he wouldn’t listen, too stubborn.
I’d want him to know I was grateful for all those things he was doing,
Even the alcoholism
And the melancholy,
Because he was fearless in his heart:
His hands always outstretched in the dark
His thoughts benevolent and mad,
Making me
Me!
And for that
I sort of think that
I now owe him one.
And all in all
I do not regret any of it.
For you see
Vaquero lived
To dream
Of shores
Overflowing with
Veracious
And
Refulgent
Dawns,
He did not live to dwindle, uninspired,
And diminish
Like he was already a corpse.