The Skycycle Blues
In another installation of, Jeff posting things on here in order to avoid ranting at friends over WhatsApp… I’m geeking over how incredible B. Dolan’s poems are. In my last post I already shared one of them, about traumatic suburban childhoods, but this one is about the motorcycle stunt jumper Evel Knieval.
I umm… would love to be able to write things like this someday. I’m guessing it’s related to the mathy/pattern-recognition-y analytic-ness of my brain, but something about these poems just really hits different—to me it feels like, every tiny little detail here is perfectly placed, so as to coalesce into an absolutely brilliant whole. It’s like Seurat but, even the little dots are themselves mini works of art? Anyways, these are just the specific parts of it that give me maximal goosebumps.
Somewhere, in between heaven and the landing ramp,
Lies the sacred mathematics of chance, the calculated risk.Gasoline. Throttle. Thumbs up. Let her fly!
And tear into the fabric of an instant
Where you can live an entire lifetime
In the star-dusted, flash-bulb infinity
Of an impossible launch into space,
That climbs to the top of its arc
And beats the sky back another inch.Only to crumble, and collapse.
Only to fall, and return to the earth
With no illusions of immortality,
And pay the cost of dreaming.Like your skin stretched out in ribbons
Along a hundred yards of hot tar.
Like those ghostly, ruined bones
On the X-ray photo.
Like the steel plates,
The pins and the screws they jam into you,
Until you’ve got more in common with your bike
Than you do with any human being.By 1976, Evel Knievel’s body is a monument in ruins.
The scorched remains of the war
He waged against his own flesh.
Kids come home crippled from Vietnam
Writing him letters saying, “Thank you, sir.
I figure, if you can get back up and go on,
Then I can too.”
(And, if you’re okay with spoilers… the ending:)
But as he flies across the gaps
Between his public appearances,
Burning through cocaine like money,
With women whose faces are made up
To look like neon motel signs,
He begins to feel the vacancy
Of a million lights shining on his skin.You’re Evel Knieval, the twinkle in America’s eye.
But every day you age another year.
And you watch, as if in a dream,
As you fail every single person in your life,
To pay the cost of dreaming.The botched attempts, the bankruptcies,
The divorce, the loss of your family.
All the bad blood in your veins,
From hepatitis, kidney failure.
In a wheelchair, in old age,
Living to discover yourself
Shrinking to the size of a footnote.
A novelty, a gag, an oddity.
All of it part of the long, drawn out revenge
Of the cowardly enemy, who was beside you all along.In 2007, Robert Craig Knievel
Tells the Hour of Power Christian Telecast
About waking up and seeing the devil in his bedroom.
Speaking carefully and slowly,
The broken man explains to the congregation
How he rose up in bed and yelled:
“Devil! Devil!”
“You bastard, you! Get away from me!”
“I cast you out of my life!”
“I just got on my knees and prayed,” said Evel.
“Got on my knees and prayed.”
“I prayed that god would put his arms around me,
And never ever ever let me go.”He was not a good man,
But he was a Great Man.
And for that, he deserves
Mercy, Death. Mercy.