AUSTIN McCARRON CAPITAL LIBERTY Historically grouchy, gladly keeping its distance, forgetting the name of everyone who passes, the city is a language in details, a compact dictionary, a population of words, less active than suppressed, testing raw nerves, never seeing, never the same. The sky is like white ointment rubbed into air. I walk into the city, with parks, gardens, water, appearing like hallucinations at lunar intervals. There is nowhere in the world I want to be. I think where I grew up, where I live now, is nowhere. I sit weighed down by storms, on the corner of ashes, where the centuries vibrate, where brown water flows. The scaffolding erected to clean stone is coming down. I follow the river, measuring the distance, the squalour, of tribal conversations, clamouring dialect, insubstantial prints, the wordless silence of unhappy nations. I claim this to be real, otherwise I would convert to stone. I squeeze out of the humid afternoon a place to stand. I tip over, not content with the motion of the universe. I shake hands with silence, rub shoulders with air. I growl my joy, a broken compass pointing in all directions. Back to TUT Samples Back to The Ugly Tree The Library