On First Looking Into Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

To Eamon I followed you down that long straight road Stretched through plain under sky You with your boy and your bicycle Me, with Despair in my stare and my sigh. And we came to the Dante-esque crossroads And watched as ghosts in machines drove by. I had seen, of course, this show before But not with you by my side And the loneliness was lessened With two caught on life’s cold neap tide. Two sheep in the false wolf’s clothing Of an alienating pride. Trekking miles of running blacktop Not knowing if to or from Just keeping present with the moments Of time coming and time gone. And the twisted things that the intellect Poured its poisoned moonlight on. We stopped at a dusty layby High and bare upon a bluff And I felt suddenly false and foolish Caught up in your family stuff. Like a dog around a carcass Who cannot eat enough. Oh blindly I adored you Your machinelike cold control As you calmly dissected other lives In a way that showed no soul. And I thus refused what God had dropped In my Buddhist begging bowl. When we chilled out at the ranchhouse I simply couldn’t see That intellectualising Was not where we needed to be. That we cut ourselves with the scalpel That was meant to set us free. We were miles from that messy pump the heart That overrules the head When talk comes dark and throaty Or gesture rules instead. And the soft look of submission Says the things that can’t be said. O it’s hard to track the wolf man Who hates being spied upon And who when he sees it’s over Thinks it’s easy to move on. For the present’s lean and hungry And the road leads from Babylon. Yes it’s hard to see the wolfman Ever watchful for the spy Tho’ sometimes you will catch him Under the fitful moonlit sky On a road forever straightened In his wide and suffering eye.