Riding the Thin Line

I am a man who needs the motorcycle.

I am a man who needs the motorcycle more than he needs air.

I am NOT a man, but a fish out of water, ONLY in the land that I am

So familiar.

And even though I ride in dress shoes,

It doesn’t mean that I am not fit to ride one.

It is a curse to live on a street where

All the houses look the same.

And Judas, who lives across the way,

Keeps promising me that he will paint his house

A different color.

But then he never does.

If I do not have this motorcycle, then I will never leave.

For this motorcycle is much more than just two wheels

And the loud grumbling sound.

Those two wheels are the sun and the moon;

One burns a hole in my heart,

And the other provides light for me to see through it.

That loud grumbling sound

Is the stomach of the Earth,

Or maybe it’s my own stomach,

Hungering to see the rest of the world.

And at night,

When the stars are out dancing

And whispering to each other,

Telling tales to each other of the things that they’ve seen

Or the things that they have done,

I am outside, too,

Cleaning the headlights and the exhaust pipe

With a pink rag stained black with oil.

A pity sight, this thing, this bit of cloth

Held together by thin strings and dust and dirt.

It looks like it has been chewed up and spat back out again

By something with no respect for this world.

This rag.

But it is so much more than that.

Just as the bike is so much more

Than just a pair of wheels.

This bike is a beast.

And it hungers as much as I do

To see the mountains of the world,

Even if they cannot be conquered just yet;

To feel the waters of the Great Lakes, of the five oceans

Even if they cannot be crossed so easily.

This bike, as well as I, longs to feel not only the wind

But listen to the wind sing along with us,

As we brush by trees that wave goodbye.

This is the only thing in the world that I fear as much as I love.

And when I grip the handles,

Two kinds of tingles are sent down my spine.

One is a toast to the unknown, and the other is to what is to come.

Both are so similar and yet so different,

As we FEAR the unknown, but WONDER of what is yet to come.

I ride a thin line between both.

Between both FEAR and WONDER.

The unknown, and what is to come.

This bike is untamed, and yet it needs no leash,

And it needs no collar,

And it has no name.

Does the road to freedom have a name?

If you give something so magnificent and so majestic an identity,

Then you steal from it it's immortality.

By slapping a name on an animal,

It then becomes yours and yours alone,

And its status drops from “free” to “domesticated.”

This motorcycle does not belong to me.

It CHOSE me.

It BELONGS to no one and no thing.

You might say that it belongs to the Earth, but you would be wrong.

The EARTH belongs to the bike.

And when I am on this creature,

The Earth belongs to me as well.

That is all I need.