WARREN LEVER
TAO
They have chorused down the taps, warmed in the heat of an oven: the eyes have turned back inside themselves and toiled through the dark filmmaking of mind, being unreflective and dull, and parted from a nature un-revealed through want of looking:
The Tao is found in the gaze of a sparrow.
HEIRS
There are three girls waiting and smoking under a bus shelter. Shift workers passed, glazed their cars in rain; cut black ice. three girl’s arms crossed, cold white skin.
one scuffed her heels, traced a grove, and came across an ancient foot print set into poured concrete where I stamped myself upon an age.
there was a time when all we needed was a permanent black marker and a window we drew on – reflections of ourselves through the ce-fax of midnight.
a crisp packet ran a gutter and its foil picked up the orange strip-lighting; setting and night frequency for the laureates of Sheffield road.
EX-MINER’S SUNDAY
One bad morning, and so I went down the backs out on the fields and saw the auld man coyote walking in the mud of his breasted virgin-mother – crone.
the glacial movement in his eye (and the artic breath) considering the sun as her belly button that turns, flips on; then falls back and folds in.
He ‘slashes and burns’ the sky for fresh saplings of rhyme and she, ashamed of the piss and seamen that seeps from the soles of our shoes like the apache’s tears, laid this net curtain – the night frosting of twigs, fags, thickets, abandoned cars – on table
Did you know there are men who don’t just glide like you or I? but force pavement beneath to give, and the earth to blush.
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SENTINEL POETRY (ONLINE) #31, JUNE 2005. ISSN 1479-425X |