Anyone who has driven toward a sunset knows the trick it plays: the faster you go, the more firmly the horizon keeps its distance. "Touching Horizons" starts from that impossibility and then does something bold, because it lets the speaker get there. In eleven short lines, a car journey becomes a story of ambition, near-triumph and sudden collapse, and the poem leaves us to decide whether its final silence is a death or simply the end of a dream.
The opening moves with almost no friction. "I hoped into a car, / And drove." The word "hoped" is probably a slip for "hopped", but it is a fortunate one, since it suggests the trip runs on wishing as much as on petrol. The lines then pile up as short statements joined by commas rather than full stops: "I reached the horizon, / I almost touched the sun." Strictly speaking these are comma splices, yet they suit the poem, because the speaker never stops to breathe and events tumble over each other as they might at speed. The repeated "I" and the "And" that opens lines two, seven and eleven give the voice a flat, storytelling rhythm: this happened, and then this, and then this.
The peak comes with "My finger tips grazed the light." "Grazed" is a delicate verb, a brush rather than a grasp. Calling the sun "the light" makes it weightless, almost sacred. The earlier "almost" also matters, because even at the height of the journey the triumph is hedged. The old myth of flying too close to the sun is hard to avoid here, though the vehicle is a car and the fall is a crash.
The turn comes in "But I was crashed into reality." There are two things to notice. First, an idiom is made literal: we say a dream "crashes into reality", and the poem puts an actual wreck behind the phrase. Second, the grammar shifts. Until now the speaker has been the subject of active verbs (hoped, drove, reached, grazed). Now the speaker is "crashed", and something is done to them. Control leaves at exactly the moment the dream does. Nothing explains the crash, and no obstacle appears on the road. Reality simply arrives.
The sound changes too. The soft, open "grazed the light" gives way to clattering words like "crashed" and "car parts", and the vehicle that carried the dream is now debris around the speaker's body. Then comes the strangest image: "With the horizon setting above me." Horizons don't set; suns do. The slip suggests that sun and horizon have merged into one thing, the object of the chase, now sinking. "Above me" also reverses the perspective. The horizon was ahead and level, something to drive toward, but now the speaker lies on their back looking up at it. It was once close enough to touch and is now overhead and fading.
The ending is quiet. "I closed my eyes, / And I stoped driving." Literally, of course, the car is already wrecked, so the sentence must be doing something else. "Driving" also means drive, the push that sent the speaker down the road in the first place. The line can be read as death, as giving up, or as both at once, and the poem refuses to choose. Its restraint helps. There are no exclamation marks and no stated feelings, only plain verbs, so the calm of the telling becomes more unsettling than any outcry would be. The last line is also the only one that ends in a full stop, so the poem ends on its one hard halt.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run from the two syllables of "And drove" to about nine in "With the horizon setting above me", so the line lengths loosely follow the speed and the sudden stillness of the story.
The poem's value lies in compression and in the double meanings it leaves open. It does not claim to be profound, but in a few lines it holds an idea most readers will recognise: reaching for something huge is thrilling, and the closer you come, the harder the landing.