Horizons

On the inside
the desert lies
wide and golden to
the horizon - on all sides
shimmering  flat and barren
under a brown sun.

And there are signposts,
white and painted, dumb
in a drunken leaning
they point to
nothing and
no-one

except towards
what has gone. And  the dust
lies still, incapable,
air clear, sharp, the heat
infernal
as the traveller in

sweating cloth
looks around divining
the way on, burden
bumping at his back, he is alone, his
prohibition a forgetting of his
past, an assuaging of his

thirst.

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