WRONG-HEADED PROPHET
I’ve a face like a torn curtain.
A face like a punched wall or rat’s dinner.
Like a smoking battlefield.
What Shakespeare would tag rudely stamped
and curtailed of fair proportion.
A stranger in stranger times,
a frightener of small children,
I’m not the prettiest angel in the choir,
my face like a crumpled map
jammed in haste to the back of drawer.
Like a dog chewing a hornet
or car crash on a desert road.
Where few are known to travel.
Where the unloved walk alone.
WITHIN EARSHOT
Gifted with a single sense
she heard the earthworm turning
in its cot and earthen bedclothes,
turning water into passage.
She heard bacterial operas
with their casts of trillions.
Not without effort she heard
a tap root inching towards Assyria,
gutting the planet, sipping at soil,
embracing dolomite then splitting it.
In the way atoms split and how they scream,
their pains remarkably immeasurable.
Without eyes or mouth she’s heard
a wildflower coax a honeybee.
Closer, closer, it seemed to say.
You are in want and I am plenty.
