Bike Crash Under An Ancient Constellation

The night is  mostly walls and fences
we are small pieces of the sky
falling  through her corrugations 


Roaring the roar  of bicycle spokes
blurred towards the traffic’s restless cliff
lip split in defiance
streaking blood  skittish as reflectors


Thin-skinned soles, breaking, skate
grasp, let go, the road’s  grit crumbling affliction


A star around  the machine’s taut throat
hidden by  deceit’s accretions
of flaked lead paint, an oscillation
with that metronomic blur
as if  beset by wind-torn shrieks
wept meteor
a blinded giant flailed about


A guttered bite
halt  and leap
that Newtonian triangulation 
of arrows and arcs
argon blurred
a Pythagorean shout


A new sun rising  while the wheel
lazed in  radiations
devolves to froed spite
slowed as slowing  windswept pulses
a twice bitten lip


Your smile lost
pebble-skinned scowl
a constellation’s strange fixed warning
flagging pennants  and
careening misdemeanours 
a snake slewed track
the minotaur bars
bent in acquiescence
despite repose
bull’s broken neck
nevertheless defiant

Ulysses over the handle bars

Magpieing the colour blue
a seam of sky, in the pocket
of my too worn jeans, where yellow
crabbing days wore through, coins
and threads lost like summer
(I guess) a horse of cloud and air
leapt in a lunge, the trident shape
Poseidon’s scowl in wavelets cast  
against the sleepful gabions
ah, futility, Ulysses thought
the stained glass, of a martyr’s eye
cyclopean in the way it fixed
a furied vein, the bolt-tight
gun-metal jaw, ricochet and
gutter blunt, a crown above the minotaur
with blasphemies and buckled
wheel, half turning seesaw back
in the blind, almost crow-black
breakneck intercession