Sand dunes, interminable deserts, burning winds
The night temperature bitter, a land of grit
And floating above me stars
As violent as fire balloons, tactile and brilliant
The all-enveloping sky, a cloak of soot
This is my story, my brief biography
The sum total of my experience
I travel, a compa** useless in my useless hand
Through a sandscape, a singular topography
I am a continent, a violated geography
Restless in all this emptiness
I seek a fellow traveller, search for a sign
A secret handshake, a phrase
Some unusual colour like periwinkle, for instance, or bright citrine
But the monotony of sand persists
And nothing improbable finds entry
Into the appalling platitudes of speech
The lingua franca of everyone I meet
In this land devoid of flags and pageantry
Yet still I journey to this naked country
For something in its nakedness has a beauty so pure
It’s as if I thrust a knife into my immaculate flesh
And drew it forth without a drop of blood being spilled
It is abstract and invisible as air, this empty geometry
This ampersand upon ampersand
That leads me on as if I were zero or the minus sign
Through ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’
To seek a form which dances in the sand
But nothing formal dances
Only the wind blows unchoreographed
A floating ghost across the dunes
The sand molecular, airborne and free
Is faint with the scent of absolute dryness
A small mineral smell
And this almost scentlessness
This shape without shape is a violated country
One in which I am both exile and inhabitant
And though I would escape, this is my chosen landscape