Vox Populi
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Michael Simms: The Skateboarder
We feel a roar
Of vibration in the sidewalk
Beneath the glass towers
Downtown, the fierce immediacy
Of the boy flipping the skateboard
Into, out of slides and grinds
Riding a steel handrail
While pushing the limits
Of resistance as he flies
What I remember
As a useless Christmas toy
And lands like a miracle on the sidewalk
Without colliding with startled pedestrians
Observing the usual rules
Of space and time
The boy inventing art from conversation
Between body and air
Bending the city to his delinquent will
An aesthetic of big pants small wheels
A lexicon of tricks and obstacles
Not sport but defiance
Not lifestyle but thrust and risk
A kick, an aversion to common sense
The danger practiced refined remembered
Until perfection is permanent, the body
Retaining music the way
Wings remember flight
And lament the return to earth
Where summer has begun
Balmy undefined felicitous
A suffering of desire
An impatience with the assortment of lies
He’s left behind as he practices
A brave balance, his reflection fleeting
In the black glass of the window
He skates past the No Skating sign
An immaculate precision
In his rebellion no more personal
Than a summer storm I hide from
Beneath the canopy of my routine
I am what the skateboarder defies
His middle finger raised in salute as he rolls by
Does a quick ollie
Kickflip heelflip popping the nose of the board
In a backwards gingersnap between his legs
Sliding down the rail again
Arms held ready for balance
Falling a certainty
For the rest of us, not for him
What survives the plunge
Looks like anger
But it’s art pushing his body
Into dark speed, precarious rapture
~~~~
Poem copyright 2025 Michael Simms. From Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025). This poem was first published in Verse Virtual.
Michael Simms is the founder and editor of Vox Populi. His publications include poetry, essays and speculative novels. In 2011 the State Legislature of Pennsylvania awarded Simms with a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.
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I have been thinking about this poem for some days.
I am amazed at how these very concrete, very specific images, one time, one place, once action, one – there become a reaffirmation of life for all of us. In these dark times, I greet that reaffirmation with a profound gratitude.
John T.
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Thank you, John T.
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Our little grandson was fascinated by the skateboard kids at the park. This is a marvelous and true poem, Michael!
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Thank you, Lisa!
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Probably skateboarding was a little before my time and even if it weren’t I was too timid to try it later on. However, I loved to go high on swings and your lines, “wings remember flight/And lament the return to earth” equally applies to those who just enjoyed swinging. Thank you for reminding me of a touch of youth. This is beautiful, Michael.
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Thank you, Mandy!
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Probably skateboarding was a little before my time and even if it weren’t I was too timid to try it later on. However, I loved to go high on swings and your lines, “wings remember flight/And lament the return to earth” equally applies to those who just enjoyed swinging. Thank you for reminding me of a touch of youth. This is beautiful, Michael.
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Probably skateboarding was a little before my time and even if it weren’t I was too timid to try it later on. However, I loved to go high on swings and your lines, “wings remember flight/And lament the return to earth” equally applies to those who just enjoyed swinging. Thank you for reminding me of a touch of youth. This is beautiful, Michael.
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I love this and wrote a more astute comment (I would say that) but WordPress lost in the log-in and re-do and re-do. I love this energy and defiance and these lines typify what I love and bring the speaker into the skateboarder’s spiritual work and his defiance:
An immaculate precision
In his rebellion no more personal
Than a summer storm I hide from
Beneath the canopy of my routine
I am what the skateboarder defies
Great Job!
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Thanks, Mary. I appreciate your attention to the poem.
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I guess the best way to show you how much I appreciate this poem is to read your new collection which I just ordered! Ka-ching!
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Thank you so much, Leo!
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A marvelous onrushing motion caught! Love it.
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Thanks, Lex!
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“the boy inventing art from a conversation between body and air” Thanks so much for this poem! It’s precision astounds.
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Thanks, Luray!
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George Yancy is having connectivity issues, so he asked me to post this for him: “As I read “Skateboarder,” I thought of Clifford Geertz’s conception of a “thick description.” You do just that. You move the reader into the aesthetics of movement, and the phenomenological motility of the art, practice, and defiance of skateboarding. Your eye for detail is a brilliant gift, one that, in the case of skateboarding, ushers the reader into a lifeworld filled with meaning, embodied freedom, and corporeal fluidity.Thank you!”
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Excellent!
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Thank you, Bruce!
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“What survives the plunge
Looks like anger
But it’s art pushing his body
Into dark speed, precarious rapture”
“Precarious rapture”— what we feel when we read a poem as powerful as yours, Michael. And what we feel when we realize that all of us, skaters or not, are speeding toward death….
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Oh my, Louise. Thank you so much.
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Ah, what a muscular, leaning this way and that skateboarding sentence that is still going.
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Thank you, Bob. You’ve described exactly what I was going for. My wife calls this poem my ars poetica.
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Michael, couldn’t fit this into the review of “Jubal Rising” but I’ve never before felt so present and represented in a poem. As a former skater who used Downtown Pittsburgh and my hometown of Carnegie as the landscape of my “defiance” you get the details right. Nice work.
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Somehow, Fred, I can see your tall strong body leaning into the flow. Thank you!
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So much to admire and love in this poem! “The boy inventing art from conversation / Between body and air”, “the body /
Retaining music the way / Wings remember flight,” “Kickflip heelflip popping the nose of the board /
In a backwards gingersnap between his legs” — and that ending! Bravo, Michael, and thank you!!!
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Thank you, Meg. Love your sonnets. They fly!
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Oh, wow, Michael. I can’t add anything to what’s already been said. This is truly breathtaking. I was skateboarding with this kid, lived every daring turn and flip. I looked down into the street and saw him. And then came this: “In his rebellion no more personal / than a summer storm I hide from / Beneath the canopy of my routine”. This is an awesome poem. Truly awseome – a word I hardly ever use. Indeed: How on earth did you do this?
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Coming from someone as sophisticated as you are, Rose Mary, this comment makes me blush with pride. Thank you, my friend!
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And your comment makes me blush too. 🙂
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How did you do this Michael?! capture so perfectly the kinesthetic sense of skateboarding! I’ve never tried it but watch in awe, ‘not sport but defiance’, ‘art pushing his body’. You give us an entry into this world with your words. Bravo!
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Thank you, Jan!
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My son, at 7, asked for a skateboard — and this changed his life. He skated every day, even in college, then med school, as soon as he was done studying he’d go skate on ramps, on the streets, coming home bruised and elated! Now, at 55, he still loves to go to watch skaters, & although he can’t skate anymore, he took up surfing: getting up early to go skate as the sun comes up, and before going to the hospital where he works…He told me about the culture of skateboarding — so respectful of others, so attentive to friendships. I am sending him your poem, Michael!
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I made a mistake: he gets up early to go surf as the sun rises– not skate!
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Very similar. I did both as a kid, but surfing appealed to me more. Knocking my head against the water was better than knocking it against the cement!
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Thank you so much, Laure-Anne. When my son was a teenager he skateboarded. I was terrified he would hit his head.
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I am of an age when a skateboard was a piece of planed board with double sets wheels screwed to the bottom. No wide swath of fiberglass with lips curled at either end. My skateboard was freedom only up and down the block my house was on, but that delicious feeling of the wind in my hair, seeing how fast I could go before losing it because of a pebble in my path was marvelous. I never thought of it as rebellion, though it was, in a way. Until the day came and I flew off my board into a patch of prickly pear cactus at the end of a neighbor’s drive. Thus ended my career (not that anyone had thought of having one back then) as a skateboarder, and my next rebellion was on a bicycle. I do love the metaphor of a skateboard as rebellion. Excellent piece, Michael!
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Thanks, Bean. I’m in awe of these young people on their flying boards!
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“Retaining music the way Wings remember flight And lament the return to earth…”
Wow. And of course there’s a lot more.
To read this was to remember being struck by it when I first saw it in *Verse Virtual… *and then in the book.
Bravo.
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Thanks, Syd. Your praise means the world to me.
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all you poets do your flips and ollies and raise your finger in salute!
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hahahahahaha! thank you, my love.
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Love this, Michael! My son is a skateboarder and it brought it all back. I did my share of hills on a skateboard as well.
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I tried it a little when I was a teenager and nearly broke my neck.
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Thanks, Sally!
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I used to zig-zag back and forth on Vermont hills as though I were skiing. I wore no helmet…
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We thought helmets, life preservers, seat belts and common sense were for babies.
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Yes. 🙂
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Nearby, they’re creating a new city from scratch, on a thousand acres of industrial demolition. Along with the usual playground, the designers have created spaces for three special groups: pickleballers, skateboarders, and dogs. Each has its own separate musicality. Plonks, and shouts of competition from the pickles, clicks, clacks, silent seconds, and smacks of landing from the skateboard folks, and whistles, name-calling, and barks of and at the dogs.
Each space to be meaningfully written of poetically, needs its own music, and you have done that so well, Michael. Short lines work for what you evoke, as opposed to longer lines for inline skaters with their glides. Robert Wrigley writes in his book Nemerov’s Door, on the connections of musicality and sense. You pass his test with high flying colors. Write on, dude.
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Thank you so much, Jim. I love the symphony of the community space you describe.
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A wonderful poem, Michael. Such rich details! The lines themselves are like riding a skateboard, zigzagging the reader this way and that. Congratulations on the new book!
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Thanks, Christine. Love your poems!
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Every line vivid. We are there. Thank you Michael. A far cry from the clunky red early version I had as a child.
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Thanks, Jackie. I had one of those red ones when I was a kid too!
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Love this Michael!Sent from my iPhone
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Thanks, Donna. I’m reading Gravity now. Your poems are so succinct and powerful.
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Thank you so much Michael! Th
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Its this exactly Michael, and so beautifully done, poem and skater and act behave synchronously, you have the physics, the human Psyche, and the elemental arrangements so perfectly tuned! We drove our son and almost more of his buddies than fit in the car for an overnight to St Augustine, FL which has a great public skate park and they raged against their own dark, each of them for almost as much time as we could stand to give. Now 20 years later, none of them want or are even capable of it, (some are in pain) Johannes Stuckey turned pro, skated the longest, but even he is out. We all remember that magic weekend, however, when everything about that was right!
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Thanks, Sean. It is a beautiful but dangerous art.
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