I My Bike: Voiceover Script
by Ken Paul Rosenthal © 2001
Breaths. Deep breaths.
And with each breath
you go deeper and deeper into yourself
as I count backwards:
Minus 10
Minus 9
Minus 8, 7…
Riding deeper 6, 5…
Gliding deeper
Minus 4…
Coasting towards that safe space you’ve visited before.
Minus 3, minus 2…
Ollie, ollie all come free. Ollie, ollie all come free.
Here I come.
Staring into the sun.
My wheels are melting.
I am falling. And I am melting.
An ice cream cone on the hot pavement.
I live in the city.
A buoy in a sea of concrete.
My arteries are jammed with the intermittent pulse
of traffic lights, brake lights, and neon.
I see me in the blur of bus windows.
I see me hung from a telephone pole.
I see me in a puddle of shattered glass.
In my bathroom mirror I see:
Fallen bridgework
Ruptured pipelines
Oil spills and exhaust.
I am a walking wound.
I am black and blue.
Each new scar on my finger is another place
I cannot feel you.
Each new scar on my body is another place
I cannot feel your touch.
I am a Body Without Organs.
Men drill holes in the street
and holes open in me.
I drew up a blueprint as a child:
Place thumb on hot iron
Connect wet finger to electric socket
Insert knife in flesh.
There is a movie in my mind:
I bike into on-coming traffic
Car door punctures my face
Pause. Rewind.
Car door punctures my face.
I ride into a tunnel.
A single, blinking headlight beckons me
deeper…
Minus 3
deeper…
Minus 2
deeper…
I glide past the flashing turn signal of a freshly abandoned car wreck.
A battered lighthouse that has steered me away from the rocks.
Perhaps I can be grateful for my cuts and bruises.
The black and blue reminds me
that my heart is still working.
Like Frankenstein’s creature
I am a corpse revived.
I follow my shadow to the sea
and swim till my toes turn blue.
I lay very still
slip from my body
and float through a sunlit portal.
How will I be recycled?
A blade of grass groping through the sidewalk?
A rose petal or a bike pedal?
A seed in the dark earth
waiting to be inseminated
by light.