I think I can sum up all my thoughts as a double-edged sword: good metaphors with less-than-stellar presentation.
Even the very first line encapsulates this duality quite well: why two adjectives right next to each other, when instead you could say something like, "I plod alone through a blanket of trees" (just an example), and offer the same effect, just in a more aesthetically pleasing way? I always recommend that while describing things, people use as few adjectives and adverbs as possible, because it allows you to get lazy with word choice elsewhere. You'll say "big animal" instead of "leviathan" and that's no fun.
This isn't always the case, however. "Mirage" is much more interesting than something more broad and vague like "illusion," just as "searing" is more interesting than "burning." You do, at times, demonstrate a keen understanding of why specific words are better than vague ones; why it makes for a better poem when you describe the exact TYPE of burning. (Searing, after all, is different from smoldering, blazing, and erupting. Yet the word "burning" could be describing any or all of these and is rather dull as a result, as it actually says very little by not being specific enough.)
Knowing this, the weakest passages IMO are ones like "this scorching sun won't make me cave." "Make you cave" how? Is it crushing you, bleeding you out, flaying you alive? What does the sun's torture look and feel like?
I'd have written that phrase as "this scorching sun won't break me," at the very least, since the words "make me" say almost nothing as far as verbs go. We're just as interested in HOW they create these changes in you as we are in the changes themselves, so saying they "make you" cave isn't quite enough.
But like I said, the metaphors themselves are really good. My favorite is in stanza 3: "and now ... there's naught but sand."
Running out of character space so I'll leave it at that. Thanks for reading and I hope it helps.
