Since taking up skateboarding again last year after a 15-year hiatus, it has brought me back to several things I’d loved in my youth but taken for granted as my commitments to work and family have grown. Writing is one of them. So it’s fitting that I at least try to pay tribute at the shrine of the skateboard, and here’s my first offering.
Cool Night
Cool night taken freely by me; the lights of the city, the incandescent eyes that pass, playing on the pavement and curbs; the mantis lamps preying on a subcelestial emptied lot. A skateboard stamps, I, the rider, step up and am shown a third/foot taller. And, at last, the spring airs sweep the grime of winter, the scent of rot. The muscles know they now may flex, tendons stretch, and thus will wheels run on in twos and fours like a train rumbling, a rough dog panting. Their hot frictive spinning incenses my soul and spurs it on, toward imitation and invention till the body chafes with it's burning. And each tap the wheels time down resonates ancestral roller-skates. I speed past a sign: No Skateboarding not rebellious in my age, but desperate. A pop and the wood will flex, the feet attend to it: one heel kicks, or these toes flick, to flip the board on either axis; a sharp mind and smart catch will land it, else chaos worsts and bites with vicious gravity. Whichever, let my chest swell in the cool night, it's lights, it's airs-- elements of which new blood is constituted. So I force life to circle through me, as inevitably the night will end as it began, I just one of many sad dogs running solo, in training to be Lone Wolves: unconquered, uncapturable but by film.
