“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.
