SHARPEYE STYLE

She is built, and on the market...
Bicycle Building.

A seventy pound re-spray on a fifty pound frame.
Hangs half finished on bracket and stand.
Your palms are patient with her. You see her with calm hands.

Is imagination like invisible ink for lemon juice?
Do dot-to-dot instructions light your way?
Along the nerves and neurons to your neo-cortex,
When you see a tilted tube on eBay?
Map you from the advert’s angles to this half-built thoroughbred?
Do your fingers falter to the joy before it’s theirs?
Do you know, painting by numbers, the result, in your head?
“I think therefore it is”, or: “when I reach it, then it’s there?”

So. For the chop, that cheap tin plate of crankset and chainring,
Discarded on the floor. A sleek new crown chosen.
Ground and rubbed to size these washers and spacers
Hold these strangers’ limbs and parts in place. The
Perfect pedals. No pret a porter here. Bespoke no less -
But bits of others’ bodies. Secondhanders.
Some bike boneyard gives you of its best.

Note this innovation now. Two holes drilled tiny
And brake cable sinews through tube bone in godly design.
Lights rare as iridology deep-set
In brake arch sockets.
It’s the bicycle of Frankenstein!

Re-poised to airy dropouts upon fork and seastay
Upturned, you touch your fingers to the unchained rims
“They’ll spin forever. Perpetual motion,” so you say.
She whispers that eternal two-wheeler tick, and hums.
We watch her come together in her deep blue spray. (Sian Martin)