Against Nation

 You got your swords, plows, assorted hooks–
    pruning, fishing,
         latches for doors,
               needles too many to count.

 My desk drawer fills with sharp points, blunt
    edges, fasteners, openers, golf tees,
         a guitar pick.

 I’ve never strummed a single chord, or beaten
    anything into anything else useful–
         spade from a spent shell,
               dulcimer pounded to lonesome tune.

 Wreck and reckon.

 It will be a battered world
    when an echo pierces the skin,
          the cluttered air,
               our ears and their hammered,
                         quite delicate drums.

If Poets Ruled

Forget the world. Even a small,
previously nomadic batch of tribes,
favorably attuned to his public voice,
as they build a bare land into oasis,
will fade from view when the poet-king
finds himself captive in the small cleft
at the base of his neighbor’s back. She bathes,
and he turns to the lyric, a honeyed song
he pulls from the hive below his belly,
the strain of a need so resonant that now,
though he foresees a war, a few more wars,
a murder or two, a beloved son’s wild ride
and death, his own public scalding
by a prophet, the scouring of his skin
with hyssop and stone, he’ll risk it.
He knows this chord, selah. How long
it lasts: song of songs, generations hence.