Nobody in this poem asks permission. It opens on "ride," and nearly every sentence after that is an order: find, soar, choke, rub, crush, make, sing. The effect is of someone reading out a grim set of instructions for a day outdoors, and the instructions get steadily worse. A bike ride past birch trees ends with a body smeared in insects and a song addressed to the dusk. Between those points the poem keeps blurring the line between enjoying nature and killing it, and then between killing and being killed.
The first stanza sets up the scene with a sneer. The birches make a "coy pleading," as if the woods were flirting for attention, and the rider simply "ignor[es]" them. What does catch the eye is the human traffic in the trees: goths "hugging ipads" and watching "youtube snuff on stolen wi-fi." The woods are supposed to be an escape, yet here violence arrives by screen, and the cheap, pilfered signal makes the whole thing feel furtive. Death is already in the forest before any insect is swatted.
In the second stanza the poem turns on its own maker. The speaker is told to "erimace knowingly at the poet / sipping fanta," a joke at the expense of the writerly type with a fizzy orange drink. The odd spelling of "erimace" reads like "grimace" with a stray letter, and it adds to the sense of a voice slightly out of control. Then the movement lurches. The rider is suddenly airborne, soaring "through sun beam bars" (light that looks like a cage) and sucking "flies through baleen teeth." Baleen belongs to whales, which strain their food from the water, and the image turns the speaker into a mouth that filters the air for small lives. The stanza ends by breaking mid-sentence on "choke / in a glade," so that the line break itself catches in the throat.
The third stanza is the poem's one general statement: "it doesn't take much to make a deathbed / blooming rotted joy." "Blooming rotted" is a deliberate clash, flowering and decay in one phrase, and the poem seems to say that joy and rot arrive together. The deathbed is "sandwiched / between speeding subarus and warehouses full / of country echoes," a landscape of cars and storage. The word "sandwiched" quietly adds another food image to the earlier fanta and flies, so that the poem is full of eating and being eaten. "Country echoes" could mean rural sound turned into stock, or something more mocking. The poem does not say, and the ambiguity suits a place that is neither wild nor properly built up.
The last two stanzas make the cost physical. The speaker's skin becomes "a road trip wind shield," coated in "dead things," and the second-person "your" pulls the reader into the mess. The mosquitoes are crushed "wetly" by someone "crouched / at the edge of traffic," a posture halfway between animal and pedestrian. The result is an "oozing camouflage," which is a fine paradox, since the only way to blend into this nature is to wear what has been killed in it. The poem then ends on devotion: "sing sweet psalms / to the cadaverous twilight." The tender "sweet" sits against the corpse-like "cadaverous," and the sacred form of the psalm is used on something that is at once beautiful and dead.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no capital letters, and full stops fall in the middle of lines, so sentences collide and rush on like the rider. Sound does the work rhyme might have done: "sweat past" and "glide past" echo each other, hard b's knock through "sun beam bars," and sibilants hiss through "suck," "psalms" and "cadaverous." The stanzas shrink from five lines to four, four, four and finally three, as though the poem were being used up.
Its significance lies in refusing a comfortable position. It does not praise nature or mourn it, and it does not simply mock the screens and cars either. It puts speed, appetite, technology and death into one body and asks the reader to wear that body, then sing over it anyway.