Bicycle Thief
Narrative poem
POETRY
Bicycle Thief
Narrative poem
Sketch by Author + Canva
It comes straight at me— a stolen baby blue M5 alloy electric bike ripping at 28 miles per hour, kicking up dust on a tiny stretch of Potrero Mountain Trail.
Stolen? Presumptuous? Fuck the hell no!
The rear mudguard carries stubborn baked red clay scraped from a week of shredding Sedona’s Hangover, hucking the jagged armor of Hog Heaven. Not some wimpy rich people’s trail.
Idiot fool don’t even know what the fuck he’s doing. Fat fucker’s throttles a beast he didn’t earn, ignorant of its amber warning, clueless to its flip-chip geometry, not knowing that the shock-guard is zipped with a scarred-up tie.
He handles it like a blunt instrument, barreling blind through the coastal silt, leaving the ghost of Sedona’s red dirt to choke the throat of Potrero.
He’s cross-chaining the high gears, making the cassette screech— a metal-on-metal grind slicing straight to my ears.
But this is my trail. And that’s my—
“HEY!”
The word tears out of me before thought can catch it.
I snap into a sprint, sliding through loose gravel lungs filling with salt air and dusty disbelief.
“HEY!”
As if volume alone reverberating through the canyon could stop him.
As if thieves turn around, have a conscience.
He glances back. He knows. Knows I know.
He twists the throttle.
The baby blue frame jumps forward, and I fetch a rock and fling it chasing after what’s left of the wreckage of my life down the trail.
Five minutes. Five minutes it took for some loser to come into my garage, pull off its cover, and dash away with my bike.
Five minutes!
I had just come home from the beach and went into the front yard to get the hose and wash the sand off my feet. The audacity. The predatory nature of it all. Here I am in my new home, still trying to rebuild a sense of sanctuary after losing the last one to the fires, only to find myself dropped into the middle of LA lawlessness, where we are all just standing prey for vultures.
Thirty feet away, washing the salt from your skin, completely blind to the fact that life is being scavenged in broad daylight.
I’m curious if any of you feel the same way in your neighborhood.
메타데이터
- post_id
- 5f433769fa65
- slug
- bicycle-thief-5f433769fa65
- url
- https://medium.com/the-lark/bicycle-thief-5f433769fa65
- canonical_url
- https://medium.com/the-lark/bicycle-thief-5f433769fa65
- author_url
- https://medium.com/@marycappelli
- status
- ok
- fetched_at
- 2026-07-14 19:39:34
