Improv 2, Week 5

The second improv for this week is a riff of John Jenkinson's piece, "Why Orville and Wilbur Built an Airplane"

Life, as we suspected, is a bicycle
lacking a kickstand: pedal
along for a while,

then lay it down. Some
of us glide serenely down
a long, easy hill on three-

poud Italian racers, scarcely
using any of their twenty-two
well-lubricated gears. Others

must dismount to walk
these leaden Western Flyers up
that hot, steep slope, mugged

by heavy corduroys under a midsummer
sun, light from the heavy chrome
fenders kissing our eyes closed,

the bright air that clogs our passage
thickening with effort - the shaky
wire baskets filling with rocks.


Our text speaks of how poets can offer readers logical conclusions to help them draw connections within a poem without using premise indicators like the words "because," "since," "given that," etc. Instead of supplying the reader with the reason, they are given the opportunity to come up with the reasoning themselves, with the help of just a little logic in the piece. In Jenkinson's poem, the work provides a reason for the Wilbur's construction of the airplane that would otherwise go unheeded or unrealized. Who would have thought that they built a plane because going through life on/as a 'bicycle' was rather tedious? I wanted to achieve the same effect in my improv for this week: supplying logic of a [possibly unthought of] "why" to a curious notion or question.


Why Kill the Journalist?

News, doesn't travel fast enough-
the tourtise's brother
wanes against the Earth.

Flaring once before
retiring for the evening,
fading into a peaceful night-

mare of tides rivaling only Lucifer,
but no one can sooth
and temper it. They have better

places to be. The known
unknowns exercise their witty
tongues, but not their sanity.

Memories clumsily drawn on
the back of milk cartons,
frozen over with tired

flakes of empty irises.
Telephone poles timber
into the moss covered

ground. Static-shocked,
reception terminated.
Children coninue hooping

down the street.
Life is deafened to continue.