Faster

The hot asphault shimmers,
giving them the air of the
mythical, the unreal, as
they approach the gasping
crowd, the open
whisper of the afternoon
falling before them
and their shreiking
steeds, this place
between purple
mountains where
dust rises from a
footfall despite the
thready barley
sprouting at the
verge of the track

And these armored
warriors charge
headlong at every
straight stretch, pulling
up hard and tilting
the horizon in their
frantic groupings
at the turnings in
the road, knees
skimming the ground,
elbows flung out wide,
drifting at the very
edge of control,
momentarily godlike
until one is overcome
by momentum and
flung from this
booming heaven of
speed, legs and arms
pinwheeling in the
flurry of dust,
steed bereft of
control and tumbling,
the ascendent shell
broken for a moment,
until the rider rises
from his cloud of
kicked-up soil and
is reborn, for a moment
mortal, but still great
and heroic upon the
earth, acclaimed
for his ride, his
fall, and his rise
from this dirt,

And we wish for these
things, deep in the
inchoate and unknown
cores of night when
fears overcome us
and we feel that nothing
we have done has
trancended, that we have
not become the heroes
we hoped we would
be when our heads
hardly overtopped
the stools at the
side of the breakfast
table, these moments of
bravery in the face of
danger, these intrepid
leanings into the callous
hands of fate, to sharpen
the tepid taste of the
everyday to such a
sweet ache of ectasy.