Ode to the Cycleway

Too much smashed glass on asphalt,
swerving in and out of the bike lane,
you got skaters, scooters, vapers,
someone taking selfies with boozers.
Everyone is insane after dark,
by the locked park gates;
and where do you park so no-one
can pancake the car roof off a balcony?
Someone's playing housie with a trust fund,
someone's put the rent up on white fragility,
someone's hurled cookie dough on the pavement.
Fang it, prang it, walk away totalled,
who's got the price tag of that?
Shuffle to the muffler, raise the wheels,
or tow it away from the harbour,
after raising it out of the water.
Seepage, salvage, knock-down heritage;
raise up flower power in gardens.
Let the chips fall where they may,
on airwaves, sheathed in hagfish glue,
or stuck to the highway back
when yesterday was some place to be.
Asphalt shades of greyscale
unscroll a doomslayer's papyrus,
its dried-up syrups of blood, lead, nitrate.
Gaps are bridged by sighs, years by stars
that might scratch your eyes out.
The fevered rain is not enough to wreathe a sinkhole.
Cram cranberries in your gob by the handful,
and click through dross after dross on ways
to improve the biosphere from inside your silo.
The checkout counter, like your personal biomass,
counts somewhere, maybe.
And you were born and raised in a coffin,
and now you're an astronaut on a mission,
your ashes are launched from a circus cannon,
towards a trampoline you preordered,
from your parked-up car above Lover's Leap.
Peeps are posting pics of themselves planking,
or leaning away from the goalposts,
looking down on a mass grave called Planet Earth.
Ashes drilled into the skin with a needle are blue.

— David Eggleton