The Guided Tour
They are nothing but casual tourists, ambling,
with their ice-creams and stapled pamphlets,
happily careless of the wretched history
attached to these ancient barracks;
charred flesh and fractured bones,
the lingering stink of something worse,
as the guide drones on
with his unamusing jokes and torture anecdotes.
Cracks in the floor assume absurd significance.
Corridors hump and writhe with importance.
The hungry walls close in keenly
as if to testify their witnessing.
Here ended the lives of rebels and martyrs,
bruised and scorched, crushed in screws and stretched:
Mediaeval apparatus blood-washed with pain
and an angry bell outside clangs loud
in rough narrow passages threading waves
through the stony maze
of this crude instrument of power.
Fingering mortar, I scrape it cruelly with my nail.
Pressured by the karmic force of unpurged debt,
I struggle to keep up
with the solid pack of customers ahead,
about to enter the cake shop.
Oh how do people dare to live?
How dare to sing?
Looking up for guidance I see
lounging pikemen pretending to be clouds.
Clive Donovan devotes himself full-time to poetry and has published in a wide variety of magazines including The Journal, Agenda, Acumen, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prole, Stand and Ink Sweat and Tears. He lives in the creative atmosphere of Totnes in Devon, U.K. often walking along the River Dart for inspiration. His friends say he is overdue a debut collection.