Not enough yet, not nearly enough

Remember how you and your bike used to love and crave, your handlebars twinkling with strips of sparkly vinyl, the smooth stretches of pavement, new and white, scored into neat squares and with perfect one-inch borders?

Great mountains crumbled to concrete; roots, grass, worms, tamped down and sealed under the urban permafrost. And now--why is it?--you prefer the other places, where nature is winning; where hundred-year-old roots rise up laughing at our occupation. The places those same squares erupt and meet at bitter peaks.

Your bicycle, long landfill, dreams still of those slick white straightaways, and you walk, and you watch the earth revolt and this is what you love now, and that other world was a crush we had, but will never have again.