the INLAID EAR

This ran up in the poetic forms challenge for Decima at good ol' Writer's Digest. I'm glad -  I am pleased with it: Globe of matter If ants weren’t so hungry, or if the queen disbanded the army, idle ants would do as we do: play poker, write memoir, sniff wines and pass their time in earth adrift in the disinterest of matter. We sleep through the pitter-patter of their gustatory footsteps and get up, upset to accept they have found a glob of batter.

LIFE = FULL In all this, I have been 8 weeks between publishers, falling away from Zoetic and into Norfolk. The deal feels totally right. More to come, meanwhile, the fullness of life calls: telling for the biggest audience I've faced since my stand-up comedy days — and this one was much kinder, pitching a mini-grant to the Richmond Arts & Culture Council, and very much professional work.

I was two months without a publisher while I asked and asked this game universe to come to this earnest, hopeful boy with a new smear of butter. And I said, I see I won't be famous; still I'd like to have the volume, somehow to have my book complete, though the destiny of poems is humble. And I asked and asked the harvest field for a maze of sudan grass stalks trodden— the moment you say, I haven't really been lost, as you step out of the obstacle, beyond the game you play with yourself: and there's the book come down off the shelf.  *** Mid-August I found out the publisher who was going to release my book didn't want to release it the way I wanted it. I suggested half a dozen ways to make the agreement work, but none suited the publisher; and anyway, their digital infrastructure--the pillar of their fledgling press--was not yet ready. We parted ways. As disappointed as I might be while still having food on the table, a loving family, a secure ho...

         —after *J* Blue light and piano— a tickling brook of notes— and the damn mosquito that browbeat us all night. Blue light from the window, notes by David Benoit, and our blood endowing us with life—and that nit now paused on the window digesting as I go to get Ceramics Now , an old, bloodstained issue, folded. Good morning. Pow. Here’s a wad of tissue stained with our blood that’s naught but toilet food. I kiss you in the day we’re into.