Motorcycle Therapy:


Blue.
It's one of those days.
We stare out the window while the clouds mist a lethal shine to the oil-slick roads.  The TV is 
playing to 
itself and we wonder what's on, pretending to watch it and feeling
a little bit dead.
It's got a very low battery and 
it's covered with sawdust, barricaded by too much stuff, as apportioned
to the American Way.
"Why don't you fragg your motorcycle?" she asked to my what are you doing?  Oh-nothing...
She liked to say it that way, and get the sexual reference.
What she really meant to say was:
"Get your ass on that seat and go get some help."
Hello?
"No man, you gotta be kidding.  This ain't no kind'a day to be pushing a motorcycle around."
I know he's going to say it.  "Why couldn't you do it yesterday?"
But yesterday already happened.
Three times down the block wheel skidding in the surface tension of tiny water droplets
asking from more to join them--Hey, you got any gas in this thing?
Slosh.
Yea.
"Well why don't you try their f-ing reserve tank?"
Sweat joined the mist's dispersion.
RRRooaar!
That's embarrassing.  It's a sin as bad as the kill switch.
Thanks!
"Say, what about mine now?"
I thought this weren't no day for mean men, or rabid beasts?
"That's before I saw blue."
The sky opened.
We moved a dozen lead-boxed somethings "Gotta clean this place up someday."  Yea-right!
to expose the rusted-chrome Virago competing with Valdez
for the world's worst oil disaster.
Looks like it shit its pants.
Yuck.
Shame on you.  It told him.  
I'm not going to start until you be nice to me.
"You better go."  He said.  "This may take a while."
Yea the whole weekend.
Braaack!
The fairing of the 500 Interceptor rattled god-almighty in first gear 
so I avoided going slow.  It was no stranger to the ground-
so it took speed with its breath held.  Maybe that's why I have to choke this beast 
so-damn long.  But it was  fine.  My wife was secretly jealous.
I rode her blown front seal high-speed shimmy
with a loose grip, and sliding thoughts
fluid around the corners.
It's cold, but pavement's dry on Claremont.
The tires smell their heat-up and 
it's kind'a sexual.
A man's hitchhiking with a helmet, I stop and
pick him up.
One hundred yards up the road, there's this peculiar smell and I look down to see
its infected oil leak not happening.
   "Look out!"
I pull the bike up straight on hairpin number three to sluice through four gallons of mineral oil
dropped from an alien spaceship.
"How the hell did that get there!?"
Serpentine squiggle slow to dust off the rubber, check the feet and watch
them glisten their warning.
"You nearly bit the big one."
If I hadn't-a picked you up, I'd be...
"Dead."  he finished the sentence.
Turn number three had been my specialty.
"That's my stop!"  
I'm smiling so much it hurts.  Did I have any cares?  Wasn't there some things I...
was suppose to do today?
F-'em.
Grizzly peak, back-n-forth, wait for the cars to 
get a lot of headway, then... Vrooom!
Atop the Lawrence Livermore is the evening rendezvous of suspended jet jockeys.
That's the showplace corner, where hyper-age technology leans that extra two degrees to silently 
wow the 
onlookers who-
pretend not to care.
I lean my mean beast over and grind the shoe I'm
barely attached to.
B+ for good effort I feel, borrowing a look in my sagging one-way mirror.
Next contestant.
A minus roar.
The sky's clear and cold as the yellow falls down.  There's a old hippie couple in a runaway 
yuppie truck, 
smoking a joint for the Oakland time they did that in the sixties, all agush with lust
for life.
He smiles as I don my sunset rain bibs, just to save warmth.
Hello?
San Francisco is calling.
The Bay bridge is a surreal adventure to thrill in, I decide out loud.
5:00 straight up.  Rush hour Friday deluxe.  Carpool lane, roar through he toll booth...
I'm getting better, aren't I?
Fit as a fiddle.
Look at the drivers, asleep at their wheels.  I 
pity them
and their senseless lives, as they pity the shmuck on the motorcycle
shivering in a storm of tidal wave cars, his life hinging slightly
on each one's love for not killing 
just to see what a motorized corpse would look like
with one more outlaw missing from the roads
to remind them:
That was me a year-and-a-half ago 
as I shiver some more.
Blue.
Too beautiful:
All those crawling red lights at the Treasure Island gate to rising spans of Christmas light
backed by blankets of chrome yellow haze.  The buildings are...
so surreal it seems I was a traveler from another time, who read some brochures about Earth
and how you could do this thing
of crossing this bridge at sunset
and see this miraculous sight that never before existed, and never will happen again,
and how you can ride this machine, that makes you feel so alive
you'll never want to go home
and you didn't believe it, but-
had to try anyway.
The traffic is crawling; I don't even care.  Later,
I'll adrenaline rush between standing cars
heading for South 101's Que Sirah.
They ask why this thing's legal, being so fun and all.
Blue?!
"Life's too fucking great!"  
I scream at the top of my lungs.



    ("Did you get your money's worth?")
	   something whispered.































*1994  Brock Foxworthy Hanson
240 and a half 27th Street, SF, CA 94131
--or--PO Box 45492  Seattle WA  98145