The poem began, as most honest poems do, with guilt.
I own a gravel bike. It lives in the basement. It has never seen gravel — not real gravel, not the kind it was designed for: the loose fire roads of Tuscany, the white strade bianche, the unpaved passes through French hills that its siblings in other countries are built to eat. Mine has seen concrete. Overhead lighting. The inside of a lift.
The spec sheet promises adventure. The reality is a basement in Singapore.
In Singapore, rain is not weather. It is a condition of life — sudden, total, and non-negotiable. You cannot plan around it the way cyclists in temperate countries do. It arrives in the middle of the afternoon like a cancelled appointment.
This is the specific cruelty the bicycle knows: it can only see daylight when it isn't raining. Which, in a country where the sky makes up its mind without consulting anyone, is a narrower window than it sounds. The bike is not neglected out of indifference. It is neglected out of weather, and work, and the logistical difficulty of hauling something from a basement to a world that very quickly becomes wet.
The rain stanza wrote itself first. The image of water pooling in the bell — that tiny reservoir of futility — arrived before anything else did.
I watch the water pool in my bell
— from the poem
like a tiny, useless reservoir.
I wanted to write about the other bikes around Singapore too — the ones chained to void deck pillars, slowly oxidising; the ones whose owners moved away or lost interest; the ones purchased with good intentions in January and forgotten by March. There are so many of them if you start looking.
I kept asking: what would these bikes feel, if they were human? Not metaphorically human — but actually capable of longing. The answer was uncomfortable enough to be interesting. They would feel the specific ache of being something purpose-built for a thing they are never allowed to do. They would feel the difference between being used and being kept.
The relationship between the bicycle and its owner is left deliberately vague because the poem is not really about cycling. The dynamic — attentive absence, occasional return, the apology built into a gesture — fits too many other relationships to name just one. I wanted readers to bring their own.
The Pinarello is real — or at least, real enough. There is a particular kind of performance bike in Singapore that lives indoors, wall-mounted, climate-controlled, more trophy than transport. Beautiful, and slightly tragic in its own opposite way: so precious it cannot be risked on the road.
I did not want the bicycle to be bitter about it. Bitterness would have made the poem smaller. Instead I gave it something harder to write: genuine understanding, and a quiet question about whether a love without weather in it is really a love at all, or just a form of very expensive display.
The blue-grey tone of that stanza — even the border colour on the page — is meant to feel like a different temperature. Cooler. Preserved.
An aubade is a dawn poem — traditionally, a lover's lament at the coming of morning, which signals the end of the night and the necessity of parting. I chose it because the bicycle's good days have the same bittersweet quality: the sun comes out, they go, and then the return to the void deck. Every outing is already shadowed by its ending.
Void deck is doing some work here too. In Singaporean public housing, the void deck is the open ground floor of an HDB block — a common space that is simultaneously communal and somehow desolate. It is where bicycles wait. Where old men play chess. Where funeral rites are sometimes held. It is a space for things that cannot go upstairs yet.