By Sydney Lea

to do sweet Jeanne with you this wild urge to leave behind
all that I treasure by zooming away on my old silver Norton
road bike with clip handlebars and mean engine never mind

that the two of us did that so often and country towns’ small winking
street lamps briefly lit us as we rumbled and roared below them
though we were lit up already by our idiot epical thinking

that we’d be the first ones ever to outspeed what kept on chasing us
which I suddenly ache to race from again as though we hadn’t
learned this was hogwash because even we in our garish glamorous

leathers could see how we played a script that in fact was an old one
familiar to lord knows how many people before us who’d enacted
their own absurd escapist narratives complete with explosive

trappings like the famous instance of the late Jimmy Dean who’d run
his fantasy Porsche right into something that turned out to be
much bigger than he of course and that’s not to mention my drunk

unfamous friends Mike Knott and Harry Robichaud
but wait I meant to be saying that this had nothing really
to do with you since just now I wish I could ride out solo

as thank the lord in a way those two dead kids were doing
though they were sadly far off from middle age my own
for example or—to be honest—my older age when going

solo makes its own cliché and I who today
have all I never knew I wanted so badly back then
should of all human beings who ride this earth be ashamed to say

I even imagine such wildness but then I’m a bourgeois sucker
for fantasizing but mostly I’m sorry to tell you the truth
much as I may once have hoped we were more than mere starcrossed lovers

this urge I speak of has nothing whatever to do with you.

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Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, recently published his thirteenth collection of poems, Here. Shortly ago, Able Muse published The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a graphic mock epic in collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka.

Orginally appeared in NOR 5