We died with our legs wide opened,
     our minds were closing when,
     some place over the Pyrenees,
     private jets collided;
     wasting no time rising, we each
     set a course to find it—
     seeking the philosophers stoned,
     we burned bowls of our Selves,

     wearing ashen clouds, indecent
     souls turning mortal wounds
     into profound reasons to feel
     irrational; proving
     it possible for rival beasts
     to transmute base hatred
     into truth communicated,
     we became phoenixes.

As if speaking without reason,
     weeks of sleeplessness sent
     us deep into a heresy
     no monsters could even
     pretend to comprehend if we
     explained it to them in
     churchman’s terms; those dragons would soon
     find praying meaningless,

     especially since we laymen
     quest for the imprisoned
     chest of first editions fire-priests
     buried when burning them
     in fits of fury could not bleed
     from them stories built on
     ancient evidence towering
     man to his godliest.

Only this babbling river bend
     now condescends to end
     our mouth’s most silver-tongued journey
     history’s lips moistened;
     Napoléon’s fatigued army
     had left opened wagons
     haphazardly pulled through mountains
     not used to such precious

     cargo, such slow transportation;
     below the ravine went
     the dictator’s loot, every
     spoil broken, overthrown
     by soldiers accidentally—
     so, over time, taken
     by centuries from Vatican
     hands, treasure vanishes.

We try with no skill to cross it,
     but time kills all things, said
     some French proverb, actually,
     and time’s a bitch, pregnant
     with three courses of memory
     that taste unborn and dead;
     what waste is knowledge never spent,
     we think, ink crossing us

     off-course as poets cuss us out;
     gargantuan, their pens
     plant deaf kisses all over leaves
     we wish, like life, began
     at conception and ended weeks
     before its middle can
     thwart this mission all aborted—
     all but us, the closest.

Into forested borderland
     a poet’s meter sends
     competitors and company,
     ahead of whom we run,
     determined crusaders merely
     moments, if not feet, from
     reaching literature’s golden
     mean: naked texts, secrets

     unmasked, virgin words unburdened,
     untouched ideas yearning
     to be loved; reams of liberty
     pulsing to be licked from
     prisons of paper no one’s seen—
     we reach depths forgotten,
     until no more can we deepen—
     it’s us in these boxes!