poem, poetry, motorbikes, old times

MERCUROCHROME

we left some
skin on the roads
our middle name
should be
mercurochrome

dripping pink to
tell the world
how
rubber failed us
and aphsalt turns
to grindstone
at even
less than high speed

but what is it
they chase, these bikers,
their dangerous
immortality?

I wonder to myself
abstracted from all
sense of peril
as the road narrows
in tune to the
bursts of accelerated
shifting perspective

riding a Kawa Ninja
does not
of itself make
me a Samurai

nor is it the
Nietzschean definition
of living
dangerously

just an
exercise in edge and
sense of finest balance

a dance you see
with the roar of high
compression
engine
as you get as low as
you can in terms
of centre
of gravity

molecule-thick distance between
outer edge and
blade itself