The Maze and Byron Killswater

Finding the exit immediately Byron Killswater retreated deep
Into the maze, heavily thumping the worn out paths with his heels:
Back, back to some place lost where every corner looks the same.
Hours wasted running his fingers achingly along the edges of box hedges, picking at the earth for clues, eating ripe berries from yews.
Laughing at first, so the story goes, so his tale painfully unfolds.
For, so he told us later over lager and nuts, despair was soon
snapping thankfully at those bruised new bandaged heels of his.
He paints it sharply so, sometimes, you feel you're in there with him-
Shaking his white knuckles at the darkening sky but never
Letting on to the passing rabble. Giving them his broad grin-
As if nothing would ever bother Byron Killswater. He likes toKeep everyone at arms length so that when that child ran into
Him in the centre, he played only briefly with the idea of falling down.
He had written his collected works on shreds of paper dropped, as
If by accident, the odd word or phrase occassionally fitting into place
But, 'mostly a bad rhythm, never got to the end,' was all the evidence
We needed. You see he keeps on coming back to, 'without contraries is no progression', found later on one large crumpled piece, the words written roughly in orange juice so that an iron, run hot along the blank page, revealed those stolen lines burnt brown into the paper.
Upon further investigation it's discovered that they are always with
Byron Killswater -It was his mantra as he stumbled blindly through Hampton Court maze. Just after dark he was spotted
by a ticket attendant drifting out ever so calmly, as if he were a paper bag caught on a breeze.
'If there was ever anyone on the outside',
So the part time worker observed, pouring hot tea from a flask,
Looking up once in response to a scream,
'They'd long since departed.
Perhaps they got tired waiting.'