Kid on a Scooter

1

There’s a kid, a teenage boy, who –
As far as I can see, and I’ve seen him
Nearly every time I’ve driven past the place –
Must spend all day, every day, looping
Around and around on an electric scooter
On the corner by the petrol station, then,
At the lights, crossing and re-crossing
The road to and from the supermarket.

He’d be sixteen, seventeen, not untidy,
Slight in build – helmeted some days –
Others, he wears a cap, sometimes a hood –
One thing is, he carries a cellphone
Against the handlebar in his right hand,
And gives it almost constant attention –
Perhaps he times himself shooting
The three lanes there are in each direction –
A thing he does at speed – beating the lights
For the traffic it must be, and not, I guess,
The pedestrian ones – anyway, so much
I see before the lights change for me.

The more I notice him, the more I think,
“Where are his adults?”, “How can he
Be left day after day to this mindlessness?”
Sometimes, at the sight of him, I curse the kid,
Detest the plain futility of this activity –
The purposelessness of his achievements –
The mockery too he makes of my intentions,
Those of every other stuck at the lights,
In the nerve he has in shooting like this
Across the red-light halt to all our business.

2

But then again, why should I care? It’s his life,
Or at least some part of it – yet of mine
Too, in the awareness of his presence, as
In the animosity his stunt arouses – and of mine
Again, in the reflection, more than reflection,
Self-accusation – the asking how much time,
Have I spent, or do I spend, in little
More worth than he in his? What more
To show for so much of my life
Than his circlings, his brief rapidities,
The speeding from this goal, this destination,
To that – whether behind the wheel or in mind –
And so little or so seldom finding
Any place, reason, cause, to halt for good.

For good – for some certainty of value which is
Careless of time – some true measure
Of achievement, an attainment that shows,
Beyond the reckless, that there has been and is
Individual worth, a benefit recognized
In life – that my own has been a good.
But I stop at this idea, as at this light, that
There is something to be accounted for –
That the fact of being matters – where does this
Come from? What matter what he or I do
With our time? When life itself cares nothing
In the least for either of us, why care
What this boy does, any more than he
Could give a thought for me – being
Just another of the vehicles on the road,
Waiting, like him, for the lights to change?

3

And the lights do, in their regularity,
Letting him or me head in our chosen direction –
Mine, I tell myself, as having some need,
Some place to be, an accomplishment
In the actual – his, my persuasion is,
To nothing gained, but the repeated
Exercise in the purposeless – actions both
Within, and created of, vacancy. Yet
I know too, in other thought, that I can be
Pretty much the image of him –
Distinguished, perhaps, from his trajectories
By no more than an obvious ability or
Attachment within the real, greater resolve
And effectiveness in the commonalities,
The expectations, habits, rounds
Of usual life. He has his competence,
I mine, and both of no particular
Meaning in the whole, having no purpose
But as the individual organism and
Separate circumstance have willed, or if not
Willed, just as having life itself and
Being within ways of life determine.

Do not this scooter and his repeated road-
Crossings match my own imaginings and
Exertions in ultimate inconsequence?
They must – must in a universe where nothing
Matters – where in our dependence and
Unknowing, we together form some small part
Of a whole, the resemblance and microcosm
Of the aimlessness of the surrounding world.
Can we be other? The state I inhabit,
Like that of his, is given without decision
And a temporary condition – a position,
A circumstance, resolved in individual nature –
The opportunity and consequence today
In my having a car and somewhere to go,
Or his having a scooter to describe
Arcs and circles on the pavement
There by the petrol station, and now
As a menace to the turning traffic – these
Being responses and functions equal to life.

4

But surely I do travel, and have travelled
Further than is possible in his performance –
Have made my way or been carried –
The apparent motion inseparable, indivisible,
In both – further into life, indeed into and
Beyond its apogee. I should know at least
What it is to have been, and be, alive –
Should know some use of it – know more
Than what I and he at this moment do –
In the managing of our respective vehicles,
The purposes we have in setting out each day –
This as any other – in chosen acts of motion.

He, at least, has the presence of the unique –
No other scooter waits ahead or behind
For the lights to change, no other
Parades the waiting loops and circles, makes
His sudden streaks right to left, then left
To right, ahead of the turning cars –
As an artist, he describes impeccably
My own and his condition in material being,
As if his scooter wheels were brushes,
The grubby pavement canvas, his movement
On the concrete surface the gestures
Of informed creation, but with this difference
From the painterly, that there is nothing left.

Still, as I watch, his action pictures me,
The travelling I have done and do, the advances
And retreats, the rounds and trajectories
Of being and becoming, that have brought me
Here to where I wait on another green light –
The achievements and the failures
Of understanding and ability – a motion
That is always current, that is this moment
And the next, carrying as though on wheels,
All of the existent in its passage
In time, and bearing in its motion too,
The circlings, pauses, re-balancings and
Restarts which inform the self in its watching
For this light or that – the cue and opportunity
Of forward motion, the signal to halt –
Which together are and are not
The action and consequence of will.

5

But will, it must be – as some inner light –
That brings the moment, the opportunity,
To shoot across any facing road, and
Leave the watching and the waiting
That are the pavement of the purposeless,
The condition itself of disengagement,
Of periodic vacancy in life, and make this
Or the other facing kerb – and have it
More than any loss or gain of place, but
Achievement – as character itself
Is force of will – and in achieving change
In oneself such as this, arrive at some state
Of steadiness or ordering – arrive,
That is, at a position of certainty, security,
From where the always renewing flow of traffic –
The turning, braking, waiting, I am a part of –
Has sufficiency of utility if not consequence.

And is this – the possible gain or acceptance
Of equilibrium between oneself and this
Driven world – the most of achievement,
Meaning, sufficiency, that life can offer?
Then being itself would be no more
Than the occasion, environment, for
Satisfactory alignment with the obvious –
All its worth in this, that one is loosed into life
As the possibility or the exercise
Of arriving at complacency, opportunity
After opportunity – as the lights
Within, or in their orange, red or green,
Provide the telling moment of realization
In the usual flow, offering acquiescence or
The chance to gain some goal in the material –
Reaching a position as he here does,
In actuality, on the other side of the road –
And once there, forget that this or any place
Within myself or the restless world
Has never the fact or quality of permanence,
But is contingent, temporary – forget that all
That is gained, is gained to be lost in the route
In which this our travel happens, being
Not one way and another, nor made
In loops and circles, but utterly directional.

6

In these thoughts I would be this boy
And nothing more, or have no thinking
More than his – find purpose, result
Contentment, a kind of peace, in mere
Physicality – in having, in the body’s motion
In space, the knowledge of balance and
Control, the actuality of object, thing, in fingers,
Hands, the feeling of propulsion, of speed
In the rush of air, and nothing else –
Or if not at peace – for what peace can be
In the fragility of materiality? –
At least knowing myself wholly here,
Nowhere else but within this body, world,
Accepting that this is all, that in its presence
It is complete, is nothing but the visible,
And be without the supposition, the imagining,
Of anything more or other, which is
The feeling for a meaning to the whole.
If the kid has any such certainty, I envy him.

Or if there is no such assurance, no such
Peace to be had, at least a sense,
A making sense, of this existence,
Which is no pretense of being at home –
Either here in the rolling forward of this lane,
Or arrival, parking, at some place other –
For neither this, nor any supposed destination,
Quiet the yearning engine within. I pull away
At the green, halt at orange, the red,
Whether in motion or stationary,
Seated in a vehicle of dislocation.

I look at my own life – the little and
The falsehood of it available to me
In memory – and understand nothing
Of what these days and years
Might mean, except that they once
Began and that they have a certain end.
I have been, I am, a link in a lengthening chain
Of traffic, and to what use? I can point
To love given and received, to children
With independence and ability, to some
Level of material success, and all this
In time to come, I know, will be nothing –
Every existent thing, every turning
Taken, carrying with it the certainty
And consequence of its own failure, end.

7

This is the round, these the many circles
Made, unremarked, unremembered,
Left with no trace on the surface
Of the earth any more than those that he
Describes on this dull pavement. This
Is the passage, the eventuality, of life
In time – the same startings, headways and
Retreats of human competence and frailty –
The moments of redemption as the lights
Change again, as they do, again and
Again – allowing the kid there to hurtle
Across the road one direction or the other –
And nothing alter in habit, circumstance,
Or outcome, beyond the switching red to green.

I know what it is to sink – or is it rise?
Into the luxuriance of the physical – to respond
To the beauty in the material, as to lose
Myself in another – I can understand, share in,
The thrill of his hitting the road at speed –
The shooting of the full six lanes – a crossroad
As it is – the traffic turning from either side –
You have to be swift to accomplish it, and
He is – he does it I would think as fast
As any scooter can – no small accomplishment
And no small reward, having the sense of body
At its boundary – a point beyond which
The living cannot go – and I can’t but admire
The speed, the focus and control, he needs
To beat the turning traffic and reach
The opposing pavement in one piece.

8

But the experience of this extremity of being
Cannot last, and the actuality of self
Returns – the sense of transcendence
Gone, one becomes a presence to oneself
And the physicality of world as before – and
The circling on the pavement starts again.
And yet, and yet, the going round and
Round has the character, it seems,
Of the preparatory, of being a readying –
Requisite attempt and experiment
For the attainment of a thing beyond –
As if this very repetition and limitation
Were evidence that it can and should
Be ultimately disregarded, and that
Such non-achievement must of itself
Amount to proof of something of greater
Worth and value, as in some state other,
And that life in its actuality – the being
Amidst all being, all that is on the earth –
Cannot be, or provide the whole with,
Ultimate sufficiency of purpose or of meaning.

This kid is fortunate – he has this road, the full
Six lanes of it, in its reality, to cross – he can
Leave whichever pavement he is on and
Make for the other side, superior in his choice and
Manner of accomplishment – as now,
Indifferent to us all, he checks his phone with
No glance upward at our stationary lines –
At this moment, lordly, free. Not so me –
From this windscreen, from this position
In the lanes of waiting traffic – amid cars,
Vans, the trucks, that bus there – all the vehicles
Of trade, business, other purpose, pleasure –
I look on no such attraction, inspiration,
Opportunity, see no such challenge here
To will, to bravery or competence – nothing that,
Taken and succeeded, has the promise
Of the comprehensive in revelation,
The fulfilment of fragmented understanding.
There can be nothing of such as long as I am
Seated at the lights, watching for the red
To turn to green, primed for
The immediate action of acceleration
Along with the motive mass I am a part of.

9

For him though, the supermarket, petrol station,
This intersection, the road on which
I wait and which he crosses, do not
Exist as they do in their apparent reality –
They become invisibles, the backdrop
Or the vacant stage for something
Other – their actuality is not irrelevant,
But neither is it the whole. None of these
Buildings, facilities, nothing of these surrounds
Is of concern to him – when it comes
To the meaning he pursues and wins
They do not matter – his world, the here and
Now, as he shoots the road, is elsewhere,
Without appearance, without materiality –
For all this, that is here, is always this,
And all this is always something
Other – and the kid on the scooter
Is not merely crossing pavement, concrete,
Tarmac, but turning in circles and speeding
In another place of being, one that is not
In space nor is in time, but is, as all life is,
A happening of, and within, the intangible,
The immaterial – and is it here, in this arena
Of nothingness, that he enjoys and
Shows me, that meaning may be found?

I should be this boy – or let him teach me
To take the gap in the traffic, ignore
Those about to turn, ignore these waiting –
Grab the sense of the immediate moment, and
Accelerate into the opening of vacancy,
Into the experience, the gift of being – this
Repositioning that is without situation,
Which has no petrol station, supermarket,
Intersection – these being nothing but
Visibles – and nothing but the act of crossing
Having reality, being of any matter – all else
Left on the pavement and, though
Met with again, to have, in this action
Of removal, in the rush of transition
Both within and beyond these actualities,
The knowledge that this is to be whole.

10

Can it be only in this knowledge that we live,
And live wholly – in which we are merely
And fully alive – not in speed, in motion,
In the experience of physicality, but in their use
As means beyond their realities, in their
Combined embrace and transcending
In the simple and comprehensive
Engagement with being? – a state beyond
The self – kid or driver – and which in its totality
Unities them both – beyond too the presence
And use of pavement, road, petrol station,
Supermarket – but in absorbed recognition
Of the principle, gift and fact of life – this,
Which animates the two of us – and which
Knows nothing of time or place but
Their use, their practicality in our near reality?

If so, this truth the kid must know too, that
This state cannot be anything of habitation –
Having neither time nor place – but
Must be established in its experience
Again and again, and is always at risk
Of sight unseeing and forgetting – and that,
In its changelessness – where no position
Can be left behind or any other gained – in this
Establishing of world beyond our common own –
Is the origin and fount of meaning and
Of value, the setting of measure
And proportion, of all judgement and
Deserving – for here too, in this immateriality,
Must be the source and the renewal of a life
Which has no partiality, no care, for things,
But outlives, outlasts, outgrows, them all,
And is thus the audit and resolution
Of their worth, a requirement to set
Actualities, values, attainments, in order –
Which is the reverse in pattern and
The corrective of the habitual, the accepted,
In environment and experience – where pavement,
Road, scooter, car, in their presence,
Their need and use, form an apparent totality
And barrier to the pressure, the demand,
The unanswerable exacting need, for
The comprehensive realization of being.

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