the INLAID EAR

Do you want to put your hand on my belly and feel it kicking? I am glowing with its near-complete gestation, not dreading the labor of its arrival but aching with the anticipation, the slowness of its slow coming. I am blissed out with impatience. I am popping! The book! The book! Early Cover Concept by Eric Lindsey

this is how I feel about the book project  * * * I WANT it! I can't stop looking at it. I study its shape and odor and size as though expecting it any moment to shift, change, vanish, explode. If flung, I will go after and get it on the first bounce. If hidden, I will sniff where last seen until it's revealed. If held, I will continue to stare up, my whole face quivering, my whole body poised to, to, to I focus on how I will chew it, how I will lick into its very essence and the directories of its pieces, the threads that tie it up to the rest of what is keeping me away right now. I will free the cloudy stuff inside it, the piece of its core that makes the sounds. I will fling the disassembled unity into the air in a new broader unity — like the big bang — and roll in all the stuff that flies around artfully scattered, array all around me, panting in utter joy that smells like triumph.

Congrats! Congratulations sir, that is amazing! congratulations again on the publishing deal, Dan.  Proud of you! That's great news! Congratulations, Daniel! I admire your persistence, and I'm glad it's been rewarded! Woohoo! Congrats, man! Wow so cool!  Great to hear! A big Kudos to you, inspiring! Congrats, Daniel - I'm proud to be a part of it! Awesome Daneil Congratulations! Hey congratulations Daniel can't wait to see the work... Wow, Daniel, that is amazing and fantastic! Congrats! Sounds like you found the right home for it... Hooray! Mazel Tov!!! I'm so happy for you! Great job!!! Xoxoxo This is absolutely WONDERFUL news. yea daniel  hooray and congrats Great news! Hope all goes well with that venture. What a great story! Excited for you! Mazel tov, Daniel! Glad to be a part of this your thriving universe-singing gladbeing unfurling : )

The process of poetry happens as I walk to the carpool stop, as a move between meetings at work (and sometimes in the meetings), as I make coffee in the morning and as I shampoo my sparse crop at night. How do I help words unleash their power under poetic reading? Which words do I choose? When do I speak in plain details, when do I ask my readers to make intuitive leaps, when do I swirl into an abstraction of rainbow oil slick? Search me. With Chuckie Alston's wonderful illustration are two versions of the same poem, "Road Not Taken," written, you've probably already surmised, with a nod to Robert Frost. Which version do you prefer and why? I would love to have your input. I know which one I'm leaning toward, and I wonder if you'll lean the same way. Many lines are the same between versions, but the endings are toned quite differently. I'd sure appreciate a quick comment about your preference, either in the comments section below or on the Facebook ...

Hold that time While, the movie’s a slog to me, if my seven-year-old daughter were a U.S. year, she would be 1947. Summer. “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis…” She is transported on Garland’s Technicolor eyes to a time cradled tenderly in the arms of a later time. They used film as a salve and an opiate. Maybe she won’t find out how glum Judy became. The plot’s struggles, in retrospect, are quick to dim. When we watch the “Making of…” reel, it opens with clips of bombers. Instead we steer on Google to The Fair and Liza Minnelli. Judy Garland by Shraya Rajbhandary

By Kato Jaworski An unlikely story Could I dismantle my stake in progress? Delete a few of the novelty apps from my iPhone? Stop using GPS? Postpone texting while I’m on the crapper? Can I leave the net, go mobilephoneless? Can I store a dead laptop in burlap? Without my computer, will there be lunch? I’ll work at home, schedule a midday nap. I’ll free the old well and muck out the sludge. I will be thirsty. I will be a mess. Where can I walk when the Honda won’t budge? Can I rest long nights in February? I’ll make my own music on wires and jugs. I’ll stitch my own wounds, meet pain’s ecstasies, and make a storied storehouse of my lap. In summer only I’d eat ripe cherries, and hang The Apple back upon The Tree.

By Katina Huston Meditation The smooth stones blessed in Quan Yin’s radius, shaded by the rambling ficus, give way to the pale paisleys of my bed sheets, mussed in slow rising to the views of a day. Soon the traffic of the busiest blocks filters tidally through my maculae and into my mouth, parted as I saw on the serene Buddha faces arrayed everywhere I went in Ayutthaya. Where I sit like this is all one locus, where my thoughts’ weight and quantity withdraw becoming as light and few as the skies I’ve known. All seats are found in the same straw. All breath is drawn from one well. As it slows I count the cycles lifting away. Here the meat of a being that sees and moves recalls the unity it itself proves.

Whose idea?     “We send the monkey out to Planet X in the Horsehead Nebula—     the planet that looks like it’s coming and going at the same time—     so monkey can collect soil samples and watch the stars being born.”         —Dan Carbone Records (that no one will ever review) reflect that you were assembled and set onto an unexplored planet, into a vast, indifferent deepness. Your settings are dialed more toward “to be,” less toward “to do.” There’s a cay between seeing and seeking, but you cross it without noticing how a distant, deeper glint got you thinking: there may be something you’re supposed to know, a new mission to be revealed to you. But what it was that flashed is never shown. When you arrive where you thought you would take the source, undifferentiated glow surrounds you. If you feel, then it’s an ache. You have to stop again. You have to think. Your current programming may be a fluke. With only y...

Welcoming the new normal     late September, 2008 Who left the money for the breeze to squander? Grant turns into pulp in the gutter. The rosemary bush wears Benjamin like a cap. “It’s an ill wind,” say the neighbors, but the sun still lights up our crap, all the doodads we’ve said thanks for now tagged and arranged on our tarps. But no one’s selling wrapped foods or wool blankets, so nobody trades in currency, only rumors. At least we have fresh rosemary to make our spaghetti gourmet. Gift-giving traditions may be impeached this year—but you don’t shop for what I want most. Luckily my favorite gift from you is free. By Tom Franco

Thanatopsis Since we don’t know the minute or the hour, when should we begin our soliloquy? It wouldn’t do to speak up too soon or, worse, start late and run out of energy before the coil of our wisdom finds air. Our speech grows solemn with priority as though this were our moment in the play. This statement—and this—take such gravity; but every scene and every act gives way to the next. The waitress comes. We order breakfast. I give my line, a throwaway: “Eggs over medium, sourdough toast.” Most words need no timbrous tenor. Each day we had will have gone by unlike the next. After the service, we’ll saying something twee. Then it will be dinnertime. Time to rest. Time to let the silence express it best.

Your most basic process that you may still control when all other choices get taken from you, pulled off like skin or voice, is picking up the morsel, putting it in your mouth. Chew, chew, chew and swallow. You are hungry. Outside of that fact, your actions are yours. Maybe. Without that freedom, what are you? A can with two snout holes gasping for some human prayer of peace within hell. We trust our wills to be sacred, but check YouTube. Art by print maker, activist Doug Minkler. See more of his work .

Now hear how musicians transcend maya (or the illusions of self we each have). Orchestras synthesize trembling mana, and honey rises from the nascent hive. Harmony is the honey of many. To fuse in unison so as to live— then to lose oneself—that’s life’s best honey. Your strings ooze into the communal line of woven sweet. Then the whole great world hones its taste on this one music. It’s zany how the swarm of cells inside a bee’s bones, and the million details that make a home— plus all your memories dumped from boxes— don’t make a mess. A clear lyric has come— chaos looping and closing in a link, that fits into a geometric comb in the sweet, cellular, symphonic womb. Wow. Dianne Romaine HEY, RHYME FANS: Check out my experimental rhyme scheme based on " Word Golf ."

More Millionaire at http://www.maakies.com/ How can I save the pieces when more pieces keep falling off? Times like these, I’m a sea- eaten clipper in a squall. Hatten down the batches! Please, sea, see me to safe landfall. Ropes and rivets rattle, drop off to dissolve on the calm floor. Why shouldn’t this whole ship of self descend into peace? Then all my pieces could sleep where they rest, in one black bed where slow, deep monsters would keep me together, finally rid of this wearing need to sail… Yet when the ocean goes dead, I don’t look down, but ahead.

Happy Birthday to Me! And here's one of my funniest poems, illustrated by the very funny Reza. Get some chuckles today at his site Poorly Drawn Lines . And read below. In case the poetry thing doesn’t work out for me, you’ll be relieved to know I have skills. I build bookshelves, dressers, closets, cabinets, and other furniture from prefab pieces. I am a craftsman of only the finest particle boards and composites. I have tools, the complete set: a hammer, and not one but two screwdrivers. I’ve also amassed some screws and several Allen wrenches (now safely kept behind the dryer. If I need them, I’ll get a magnet and string.) I can read Swedish charts more or less, and I can construct a brand new night stand in fewer than four goddamn-fuck-its. If I start at sunrise, by midafternoon I’ll have one new shelf and a few new BandAids. Engineered furnishing. It’s a train: fast, smooth and streamlined. And I’m the engineer—choo-choo!

Even after watching him smack face first into countless trees over endless days, the ape named Ape had still not fully guessed the depths of his friend George’s naiveté— not until George’s “Doggie,” Shep traversed the ancestral passage to the graveyard of elephants. George continued calling for Shep at dusk and setting out huge plates of chow insisting he would be hungry when he came home. George’s mate Ursula and Ape both tried to explain what dying was, but George would open a breadfruit and shout, “Here, Shep!” Ape was awed at the Living Saint of Primal Innocence; and he left to live with his ape tribe. He was afraid of seeing George laid on his own deathbed. Meanwhile, George still lives, calling his dog, Shep.

Roz Chast! I just have to say before the feature poem begins: I am backflippingly thrilled to have Roz Chast's art in my book. Besides having loved her panels for years, she's also in a book that provided early inspiration for my current project: What The Songs Look Like , illustrated lyrics of Talking Heads. See more of Roz Chast's wonderful, funny, subtle art at her website . And now... No one moves Public chess set in the Galleria with 4-foot kings and queens: I’ve never seen anybody play. You’d have to be a chess player to suggest putting one in. Maybe some assistant set it via the mall manager. I know that a queen can be moved by a pawn—but nobody plays, far as I’ve seen, as I eat frozen yogurt, listening to podcasts at three. Watching a match would seem hilarious in San Francisco’s stylishly stifled downtown daylight. I imagine someone putting lipstick on the kings or stacking the castles in a pyramid pattern after hours, after the stodgy sun h...

My friends visit, and I feast, storing up memories, storing up memories for when they’re gone and I stand by the cupboard with my hands, with my hands talking over each other like they do when thoughts rupture so fast over my head. If forever were mine, I would be still as a painting and reach the exquisite end of wonder. Wonder why. Now my hands are recalling their American faces. I suppose we’re the same around the world—but being understood at last! Mother, I’ll return. Mother, I’ll return, but first I’m knitting this unforgettable, missing garment from the way my friends are no longer here. My hands knitting in the Sri Lankan sun, knitting what’s gone, knitting what’s not yet gone. *** This poem was published with the illustration by Ann Sheng in Wisdom Crieth Withou t, issue 10.

I had an Armageddon dream. The terrible explosion nearby sent its heat-maddened shrapnel scudding from a cloud like a decorative bottle. City center transformed into a great candle. Then the mind’s innate drive toward its own survival shifted the dream’s setting into a new panel. In this segment, I was recording the prior end-of-days scenario into my journal. This dreamself explored the symbology of fire in futures untouched by the Ragnarok fractal. In the later dream, I told you of the terror we felt standing in the hot hail of the world’s fall, now passed into the safe angst of a dream’s prior dream; but your face fell, and fell away, the final bell of the morning’s first alarm. I want to call life a blessing, shadows and all. But today, you’ll please treat me to your soft voice and a tender smile. Truth is, I'm not sure about this poem, but I so love the drawing by Heather Wilcoxon .

Thank you thank you to  Soyinka Rahim for bringing her mother's art to the book. My grandmother called this “Snare-a-husband.” She never wrote out the recipe but made me memorize it before she died. I’m humming the song of ingredients, stirring around your name, my bowl, my bird. Yet your freedom’s what I love most, my heart, and I’m far too giddy to bake a trap even if I wanted to. When we part tonight with our bellies full, night will wrap its separate dreams around us. My David, will you dream of me? Earthy smells rise up layering the edible atmosphere held steaming beneath the coal-crusted tarp of stars. If you will be mine, then we’re here for that purpose. Eat, my friend. Fill your plate. Two birds told me about the weight you bear. Swallow that bite then share, please, share your thoughts.

Shall I compare thee to a Winter’s day? Thou art more still and far more temperate. Rough winds do shake the manor’s windowpanes, and Winter’s lease hath all too short a date. But thy eternal Winter shall not fade so long as in the virgin’s blood you bathe nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade, when in eternal crimson-thirst thy ghost administers its soul-suck to thy prey. And yet in aerial din cold Death may boast his servant to the Netherworlds beguiles. Innocent, I laid near thee, Twilit Host, but, O, thy soul within a nadir lie. By dawn we both drank deep the salt of Fate. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can cry, so long we shun the light, we canst not die. by Mark Hammermeister - here's the full-color version!