No man’s land

There is a wasted space between
us, a plain as large as the Gobi,
a treeless pan that makes
the Simpson seem no less scary
than a barefoot stroll in a sandy
and featureless desert.

It wasn’t planned this way, along
the track the arctic mesa we
sleep in became a corral of
divergence, a battlefield of
allegiance defined only by
the sides we sleep upon.

We are confined to the margins of a
vast sleeping edifice separated by
a ‘no-man’s-land’ raked and raddled
with imaginary salvoes of lethal cannon
fire, swathed in rumour and invective,
entered only under duress of a white flag.
© I.D. Carswell