liner poetry by dean young

Like the asteroid but unlike the ostrich, least melodious of birds, music is composed primarily of phlogiston, a highly conductive plasma found throughout the known and unknown world. It would be a mistake to underestimate the ostrich in the wild, capable of dashing down a healthy accelerating man, its beak indeed uncanny but a pianist is stronger. Most asteroids burn up in the outer sphere or miss entirely but every now and then out of the blue we all get mail. So too melodies are delivered. They may pierce like arrows forcing you to curse the D.J. for never saying who or snow you in for weeks. It is not Apollo but Hermes, shifty messenger god who invented the first stringed instrument to get himself out of a major pickle over some cows. Singing predates speech as cajolery, payoff, declaration of war, apology and psychoanalysis by fifty million years so ever since speech's been trying to catch up boom sha la la boom. An infant's earliest memories are composed entirely of notes which is why the emotional response to music is so pure and true. It's not trying to sell you insurance! When it says your name, it's your real name, not the one soldered to your undercarriage for tax purposes. I have eaten my cinnamon roll very fast and that too is music. I'll never forget her face ditto. Skipping in green rain, the cell vibrating in the chest. I find it hard to believe in angels unless they're armed with trumpets. To see music written down is stranger than seeing a dissected cadaver but not as traumatic, both are encrypted but one is very gray, smells awful and gets injected with rubber for buoyancy. Even during decrescendo, music always rises. A racecar that burns no fossil fuel! Mountain that feeds from your hand! So I put my past in music for safekeeping, that's me on the high dive in my adolescent million-gears-spinning-at-different-speeds body guarded by Tommy James and the Shondells. In fact, so much of my life-record is on record, disc and tape, I'm beginning to think music creates me, an idea that doesn't scare me. And now another song is hurtling towards us with our future on its lips, making of the singeing singing. There are people we need to thank.