Austin McCarron

The Torturer, Now Captive

The torturer, now captive,
is a thing of transparent cages,
a maker of vast solutions,
a ruler of torn clothes, who lives
in a prison of dusty windows,
a room of silent bars, of polite
diseases, of sullen trances, and
searches for a kiss among dead faces
like a man of creative wars who
knows the obligation of
power is to raise the blood it despises.

Greater than experiments of death,
of futility, insights of blood, boundaries
of insatiable law, is the corpse of light
hair and dark skin, wearing
broken shoes, badges of courage, who
day and night, keeps a journal of blood,
in motherless air, while the sun blasts
palaces of freedom with the
body of voices and the odour of decay.
Softly like a viper shaking itself free, the
profound world of evening is still.
Softly out of stone fingers
oozes the club of strange faces and eyes.

In the Name of London

In the name of London I find
at each blind turn rivers
of triumph and rivers of destitution.
There it lies, in shadows of illumination,
begging for more water to burn.
I sleep in a crisis of songs and London is my
music, but the Thames is the worst of my loves,
rich with droppings, a grey

skinned trough on which savages once bathed.
Rougher than my hair of voices is this spacious
home, tied to watery cliffs, of elected gold,
where the sun of government slowly passes.
I walk down streets packed with empty flames.
I look up at St. Paul’s and see
a chain of fountains and a heaven of bitter clouds.
I smell in dark windows the poverty of snow.
Behind
each cry of desperation I see a man clutch wind.
The city is a sty, its heart grunting with glassof inedible creations.
I grow with powerless fingers a beard of time.
I seem broken in crowds, my arms full of failed light.
I rest under stars of sand and
eat with draughts of air the berries of a twisted race.

Austin McCarron © 2012

Soup Kitchen

Seeking nourishment
I lift my lips above the soil
and starvation is a dinner
with burning voices
and my food is tins of sun
and juice of garrulous flesh.

I sit in a crowd of death with
pig of dismantled bone, hair
of diseased courses
and choose a meal of veins
from a menu of agonising dishes.
I pick at a starter of gutted eyes
and run my fork through a salad
of bitter decay. I raise knives of
dripping stone and chew on beast
of horns with maddened severity.

I drink on the tongue of a shattered
grape. I pour out the blood
of delicious blue animals on a mat of
wounded plates.
My sweet is covered in cream of time.
I inhale the smoke of life.
I pay in bills of despairing green notes.

Disappearing without trace I encounter
the body of existence and it is dead like
crabs in sunlight and it is dead like crabs
on derelict snow.
The wind of my hunger is not prolific but
obscure. I store
in my mouth fishes of venomous spring.
I see graves of my hope shudder and die.
mist of bone, sea of light, gold of sorrow.
I follow the blindest sound and it is hungry
like a bridge of
stomachs, a worm of rivers, tears of water.

Austin McCarron © 2012