Thursday’s Poem – Brakes Belong

Brakes Belong

It is frightening
beyond words
really
what some of these people are doing
these days
out on the road.

The equivalent in, say,
another sport
such as
rock climbing or skydiving
is people risking their lives
and the lives of others
for something
they saw
in a magazine.

You see them
flailing
out of control
unable to snap that skid
that famed saver
of all that is good
when they need to most.

The bike fights back
and the wheel doesn’t skid
the way they planned
and they go humping through the intersection
hoping for the best.

And one shouldn’t be fighting the bike
in situations such as these
for a truer friend
you have never had.

And the fight continues
day after day
the faux-messenger
fixie kid
and the brakeless bike
resplendent in that uniform
all of them wear
from Philly
to Flagstaff
and all points in between.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

20 Replies to “Thursday’s Poem – Brakes Belong”

  1. I see this daily in Chicago. These douche bags are just begging to be one of the fatalities here.

    “6000 crashes in Chicago between 2001 and 2005, resulting in 30 cyclist deaths.”

    Most crashes go unreported. Most injuries unreported.

  2. …nice little social commentary but i’d suggest a subtitle…

    …Brakes Belong:
    …Darwin’s Theory of Cycling Selection…

  3. CanWood gets the award for most geek’d-out reference. Nice to see another Mac/Linux/Unix user around.

    And I like my front teeth as well as being alive or able to walk on my own or whichever reason we want to agree on.

  4. Just saw one of those assclowns tag a pedestrian yesterday. I’m not sure how I’d react in a similar situation with some guy in girls’ jeans screeching at me to watch where the fuck I was going.

  5. Brakes only slow you down man!
    The real shame is the fixie kid in the chick pants can’t corner worth a damn.

  6. I saw two skinny hipsters downtown
    In the middle of a busy brick street
    Walking their fixies off the road
    by their tiny handlebars
    One had his hand covering his mouth and chin
    Blood was pouring from between his fingers

  7. nice link, bike snob good blog. what a day so far, DC is chillin
    road my little girl home on my crusier.

    some one say hell yeah

  8. Me vale verga. I’m so glad I live somewhere that isn’t tainted by urban-fixie-hipsterism. Good poem, though.