Bikes

Bikes

At 13 and filled with whatever is it that makes 13 year olds go,
bored and restless, in love with our joints and muscles, in love
with the feeling of pedals churning and the ping of hollow aluminum bats
connecting with baseballs, with metal poles, chain link fences,
old broken pop machines, with anything that stood out, and
had having spent another afternoon of our last summer running
and swimming and fighting and swearing, sun-bronzed
above the neck and beneath the elbows and below the
knees, how disappointed we were, how truly dejected, to
emerge from the house to find our bikes still sprawled
on the lawn by my mother's azaleas, right where we'd left them,
to find they had in fact not been stolen by the neighbor kids
from the middle school. What loss it was to slink back into the dark
air conditioning of the concrete basement without a score to settle,
an injustice to correct, a battle to wage, a dream to labor for.