Tides of apricot sand push and clench the dunes wandering like their beetles for a manifest destiny perpetually future anterior.
Far below the breaking sand you can hear - listen! — the rust.
Motes of crude ore weeding and bleeding up through the grit each smithied by a camel-headed minotaur on a flint hammered forge near Zouérate.
Only the rebar grows at night, piercing the sky, begging for rain, to further oxidize that taste of blood and flake away in the wind no longer held captive by the barnacles in the concrete still looking for an iron hull.
You hate it, "It's crude and ugly," you say as you summon Prometheus to your lamp and file off the gleaming flechettes from your feet; because you have already begun down low near the dessicating sand to leather and harden, darken in your mold.
-Karl Adam