You can’t wait, I know. You crave the real first day of spring. The warm sun on winter-puckered skin. The smell of mud and other forms of nostril assault drifting across the fields. The dripping death of tenacious snowbanks, those perennial ghosts that haunt your yard.

Sweet, all of it. And why, look! It’s the first robin of the season chattering from a branch. On the street below, the first hooker of spring is out, pale as paper but otherwise as fine as can be. It’s a season of rebirth, and your spirit soars.

Then the first motorcycle of the season roars by with the growl of a thousand demons. The chattering robin drops to the street, dead of a massive bird coronary. The hooker runs away in fright and there you are, all alone again with every muscle in your body tightened to knots and your heart jackhammering in your chest.

The bikes will be back any day now, shiny machines with modified exhausts and volumes that will peel paint off your house and rattle years off your life. Any day now, you will fire off a letter to me, to the editor or to the police department, demanding to know why such seasonal cacophony is allowed.

Come real spring, the bikes will be back with their menacing clamor, instilling a form of fear that borders on rage among the populace. And by populace, I mean everyone. Nobody seems to like the thundering motorcycles except the people seated upon them.

I was at a car show last year, surrounded by motor heads whose very happiness depends on the configuration of cylinders, spark plugs and overhead cams. These are people whose homes are decorated with wallpaper and furniture bought at car shows who earnestly wish their entire lives could be controlled with stick shifts and pedals.

A Harley roared out of the lot. The engine revved impossibly, frightening children, whitening the hair of pedestrians, causing fish to float dead to the surface of lakes. I looked around at the car enthusiasts and they bore familiar signs of agitation.

“If I made that much noise in the GTO,” one of them said, “a cop would pull me over before I made it a hundred yards.”

True that, Al Unser.

Last year, I scanned the court listings for people who had been nabbed for excessive noise. I checked with a few and found mostly car owners with rusted and broken mufflers. They were working Joes waiting for the next paycheck to take that 1998 Neon to Midas. They had not paid thousands of dollars to have their mufflers customized to be as deafening as possible. They were the victims of hard winters and pot holes.

Every year for as long as I remember, the newspaper has reported on the matter of noise control. The loudest bikers insist they keep their rides that way because they want to be heard in case they are not seen. Police vow that this year, they will crack down. They know how many decibels are too many and they will start handing out tickets.

A cursory look at the police numbers last summer showed no noticeable rise in excessive noise summonses though the number of complaints remained as high as the clouds.

“The worst summer ever!” wrote one woman, who lives on outer Sabattus Street where the riders really crank it up after last call.

“My last nerve has just been tweaked,” complained a man who lives at a Pleasant Street intersection, where the bikes blast off with the turbulence of the space shuttle, if the space shuttle had been pimped out with a Screaming Eagle exhaust.

Babies are awakened from naps. Old people clutch their chests and wonder if this is the big one, Elizabeth. Entire neighborhoods cringe collectively and wait for the latest belching bike to fade off to the other end of the Doppler spectrum.

There are bikers who condemn the runaway noise fest of the modified motorcycles. There are others who insist that any attempts to silence them is a direct attack on their personal freedoms.

Me, I decry the in-your-face, punch-to-the-chest uproar of the loudest of them. But then, I have bike envy. Every spring I plan to get me a motorcycle; every spring I get nothing. The only one I’ve ever owned was a Honda XL 125. That’s for on- or off-road, for those of you not in the know.

How do you like me now?

I’ll bet this is the year police really make good on their promise to combat the issue and give at least as much attention to loud bikes as they do to decrepit cars with caved-in mufflers. Surely, this is the year.

You’d better hope so, brother. Because that tweeting bird in your front yard looks a little frail. And the hooker doesn’t look so good, either.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can e-mail him at [email protected].