Khaled Mattawa offers us a tragically beautiful look into his soul with his poem titled Terrorist. The piece sets off painting a grisly conflict scene in which fire crossed skies and streets decorated in "arabesques of strewn corpses" are an all to familiar alternating occurrence that continuously wear down his humanity. 

     The affect of savage death is universal in its finality. However, the value of a life is subjectively situational and culturally debatable. Mattawa does an interesting job depicting the denizens of destruction as his twin. Birthed from and into the shared condition "Everything leads me back, unified and cellular, to the womb we shared." Demonstrates this conflicting rubber banding that no matter what direction life takes him "everything" leads him back. Beginning with nonexistence to birth, we run away from nonexistence as fast and hard as we can, until we get to the end and the rubber band and it tightens, pulling us back to nonexistence.

   "Rubbing the ashes of his bones unto my face I become his blue screams at birth." is a powerfully connecting statement, ashes paint his face blue amalgamating his existence with their death. As he awaits his own death, he counts it down with each breath "Every breath I inhale is the cold wind that makes us embrace like statues of eternal lovers. In every exhale there's a wisp of silver smoke from the warm clay that binds us." From the coldness of death to the biblical reference to creation. We all breath in death, breath out life. Until we fill ourselves with death. 

     Biting off a piece of the Writer Within and spitting out the bones. There's a lot of meat on Natalie Goldberg's newest edition. It's been delightfully fattened and when served up it offers a complexity of deep flavor for not only the aspiring writer, but for anyone who seeks a deeper perspective of their every day life.
     The location for much of this perspective comes through the form of repetitious practice. Goldberg equates writing to many things, all requiring practice, she say's "like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it." The words we choose to fill our pages grow as we grow, they see as we see. The more comfortable we are with ourselves, the more we learn to trust our inner voice. But what if nobody gives a shit about that voice? Should it be silenced or should it be given the opportunity to wander around, with a blind vulnerability that desperately yearns for something worth saying? Let it wander I say, and I think Natalie would agree.
     Most of what we actually experience is inhibit by our brain, things it intuitively decides to disregard as critical for our survival. These small observations, the detection of nuance between ceiling tiles, the silence of stars in a brightly lit city, the perpetual taste of the inside of our mouths, are probably things your brain would filter out under normal conditions, unless you were open to them. These occurrences are what Goldberg would consider the ingredients for making a cake. Together an unorganized collection of experiences such as these may seem like "goop" but if you keep adding more, "a beautiful cake may rise out of the mixture of your daily details."
     The point that she makes regarding adding, the "heat" to the collection of experiences or daily details is an abstract concept. What is the heat? It isn't some literal mechanism you can activate in order to produce an engaging piece. Much of the book is directed at kindling the fire that will produce a lifetime of our own deeply personal brand of heat and then finding the guts to cook ourselves over the flames.