“Breakneck Speed”
It’s funny how teaching your kids to ride a bike, can start with death.
Training wheels squared,
upon a flat cement space.
Enclosed from busy streets.
Helmets, elbow pads, and knee pads.
Just put them on the bikes, and go.
Around the schoolyard square.
Being pulled into the gravitational reality of a pigeon corpse.
Monument gray, tits up, broken neck.
It must have flown into one of the eighty windows above the school entrance.
Taking precautions to keep the children from harm, but facing down an inadequate explanation of death.
Just fixed there on the spot, full view.
A fly surveying the scene.
Kids steering the handlebars of their bikes to avoid the pigeon corpse.
I myself, standing by, hoping they don’t maliciously drive over the broken bird for jest.
They didn’t.
Still gentle. World has not touched them yet.
Or, maybe this the first grazing shot.
The circuit repeated, over and over.
Joy in learning new things.
Sadness in learning new things.
Driving eager with breakneck speed.
Can’t keep them from flying into windows.
There are too goddamned many.
A very special thanks to A and L. Our misadventures seem to teach me so much. Hope you’re taking notes.
40/40: Summer Poem Slam-a-bam is a project in which people have joined me for 40 days and 40 nights of on-demand poetry. They have submitted the concepts, ideas, and subjects; I’ve done the rest.
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Published by Christopher Hickey
Welcome to my effort. Yes, as a great procrastinator, it requires great effort to stay focused on something productive that matters to me. I’ll find any old excuse to traipse from project to project, and I rarely end up at the place I started. I find this maddening, and exhaustive. So it is with high hopes, and a greater grasp of self-awareness, that I embark upon staying the course so to speak.
I enjoy writing. Be it blogs, fiction, poetry, etc. I love the craft and the act of creation, the art in and of itself, for it’s own sake and end. I am happy to be able to do it.
Some stats:
Born: March 1974
Education:
St.Francis de Sales, Charlestown MA
Don Bosco Technical High School, Boston MA
University of Massachusetts at Lowell, Lowell MA
Bunker Hill Community College, Charlestown MA
DePaul University, Chicago, IL
North Virginia Community College, Arlington VA
Harvard Extension School, Cambridge MA
Place of residence: Somewhere in the land of metro Boston. It’s vaguely familiar and becoming home more and more by the day, but when you come from “The Town” all else fails by comparison.
Favorite Color: I’m partial to all forms of blue.
Favorite Author: c’mon! don’t expect me to answer that, there are too many.
I enjoy memories of playing 80’s Atari better than playing any advanced gaming system that exists today.
Some day:
Hope to be recognized for my paper clip collection. As well as my 27 rejected applications to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailiey Clown college.
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