James Roark

"Jimmy Roark is on a roll! ...takes a very serious look at bicycling, relationships and poverty. This collection is like no other you will find."

The Loving Arms of Mary :
(An Irish Bicycle Blessing)

May the road rise up to meet your wheels.
May a breeze be always at your back.
May you be well past the gates of heaven
Before Peter takes note of all you lack
And safe within the loving arms of Mary
When the Devil calls to take you back.

Punk-rock Girl: (Country music lyric)
"This here's a country song. Pick it like it's real sad."

Her Name Was Minnie Pearl

Once around this ol' world, that's when I met a punk-rock girl
Whose heart I couldn't break and whose speed I couldn't make.
She rode her bike without a brake! And that "fixie" was faster than my car.

Sometimes she fell
Down blind alleys or in dark rain
Or riding on sidewalks
Or both ways on one-ways clearly marked.
She would ride through shopping malls,
Run right into walls,
And the bruises would darken her tattoos.

The aches she had within
She carved into her skin
Like sin
Indelible and not forgiven.
...

Yah, once around this ol' world,
I fell in love with a punk-rock girl
Who thought she was too smart
To have a broken heart.
But, we all know that ain't the way.
Though, when it happened,
Who the hell's to say?
'Cept she was very small,
Not at all too tall,
For a fixie,
Fixed by Daddy with training wheels,
For his baby, Minnie Pearl.

Bike Sexy is poems about women who ride bicycles. Eleven poems, eleven women, countless bicycles and the men who orbited them, all in various states of disrepair.
Studies of women, each of its own unique sort and with its own point of view, they are the result of employ for the author as an addictions counselor for active duty soldiers and veterans of the armed forces, some months following as a companion to his dying father and, finally and most creatively, a year of belonging as a mechanic at a bicycle collective. A car, you see, is pedestrian murder, but every bicycle, an eccentric love affair.

"She is the most eccentric person I know, and I know a lot of eccentric people." -One Bike Sexy woman about another.