Springs
Coda
Springs are full of bulbs and buds,
Absorb the winter shock,
Sit calmly in the pen I hold
And instigate the clock.
Keep watch, for spring has sprung again,
And manifests, instead,
In cycle rides through history
A rising from the dead.
Tiny bangs in frequencies
Have entered our grey world,
Time to oil the stiffened chain
And fir a spring-load rack.
The earth has made a partial circuit,
Coursed parabolic arcs,
A sun has burst upon the stars
And prepared us for attack.
Lamps are left to run down low,
Shards prised out of tyres,
A winter sprig extracted, gunge,
Detritus, smuts and grit.
It takes an engine made of wheels
To understand the world,
The universe of space-time, voids,
Orbits within it.
What was it? Quark? Higgs-Boson?
Both there and not all there:
The crank both pressing and lifting
Pulls back to move ahead.
Metronomic ticks mark out
Curvatures of time,
A balance of stop/motion, blind
Staccato, living dead.
A sheen of wax and paraffin
Suggests a tilted sky,
Horizons beckon pedalares
With cooling towers, smoke.
Ours is life lived in the round,
Circuitously styled,
Ellipses that accelerate
With varied rim and spoke.
The faster that the teeth are turned,
The more the earth rotates,
Solar system mechanics
Kick-start a gyroscope
And turn more cogs of gravity
In fields of matter dark,
Infinity of cranks and chains
As visible as hope.
They talk of relativity
To smash the smooth machine,
The dread beyond our modern times,
Beyond morality.
And yet the engine bends and warps
And sends out cycle-laws
That operate when pedalling
Towards infinity.
Those clip-on shoes are rotting
And the neoprene has flaked,
A drastic zip disaster
Could hold up the start of spring.
Busy atoms gather then
Explode into new buds,
The orb of long days materialised
And let the new birds sing.
In a hazy, vapour, solar storm
The bike assumes control,
Regains the laws of physics
So that time and tide rotate.
A link and tooth connection
Is all that travel takes,
A roundel on an equator
Creates a sense of fate.
They cycle round the planet now
Like satellites of thought,
Take boats across the oceans
Which are valleys lost in flood.
Their hearts enact combustion
Without fossils or dead trees,
Their oil a scarlet lubrication,
Metal cans of blood.
The rider is the transport, really,
Burnt potassium,
The journey is the ancient trek
Of universal law.
Like planets in a sun system,
Cells in composites,
Spiralling like sycamore seeds
Around a molten core.
This core is well-greased wheel hub,
A bracket in plastic sleeve,
A pedal free in looping crank,
Ergonomically
Perfection in recreation,
Body, mind, machine,
Newton, Einstein, Planck and now
The dreamers in the dream.
Mindful in the saddle,
Riding in the zone,
Full of everything, all time,
Yet empty as the void.
For all the thoughts of dying
And small gains from lactic pain,
The sense at each rotation
Is a life lived, overjoyed!
Springs are full of bulbs and buds,
Absorb the winter shock,
Sit calmly in the pen I hold
And instigate the clock.
Keep watch, for spring has sprung again,
And manifests, instead,
In cycle rides through history
A rising from the dead.
