Last night I crossed the line. (I am a deformed flamer but language itself is deformed and it's subversive so I want to go home now and read Kahil Gibran and try to get it right.) I did some bad things and I definitely crossed the line. (I forgot my tuned art of exile in the new poignant and painful wave last night and that was both eerie and real like a flashlight and recklessly middlebrow I guess.) Not the sex line. (Ok, we had a little mundane, surreal sex but it wasn't that great from across the room so does that count?) But I crossed the line in any case. (Like I said I had sex and decided to interweave other voices and limit my vocabulary, severely so, come to think of it.) I know I knew that I knew I was swept up. (I'm stalling here. I'm concatenating pithy phrases throbbing in my brain, taking a hike on the dark edge far away from familiar belief in shaken contextuality and diorama. Joshua, Merle, Ayukawa.. Rage on, beachy boys.) I'm planning to remain in office tho because King Solomon has to build after the fall. (And O Volvo! was that babe ever quotidian a fall into the deepest apeshit played to the limits of silence. I'm imagining a total eclipse. Oh, yeah, I adore a babe.) It's straightforward learning, even if it's on a curve of some sort. (The only thing that's curvy now is the place between my ass and my rectum exploding at that dangerous intersection of domesticity and science fiction. I see the fishermen. I see their daughters. What a water plane spray into the Oresteia, the lush junkyard of ecstacy!) I've been thrown a few curves of late and, I'm not crossing any more sex lines. (Not until I get my head dismembered and break into discomfited lyricism, plumbing the light in the terror of my long-predicted and now brazenly apocalyptic breakdown.) This was more .. a whole lot more than a simple affair. (Kevin and Brandon patrol this territory. They are beautiful poems. Reading them I want to bomb and then rape the living earth. Losing my soul is a revelation. I'm mad at heart. It was fun, actually.) It's a love story over time. (I love to have fun. I love to celebrate poetic living. I live to celebrate fun. I reside in California! Somehow I feel better now.) Forbidden for sure tragic but at the end of the day I promise to repay every cent I stole from every teacher, curator, art critic, and the public. (I have a carbon black Amex because that's the kind of brushed covering I am. Want to see it?) My travel costs are my business even tho I let my guard down. (Yeah, what do we care? All we want is an elegantly accessible chronicle of interdisciplinary montage. What is identity?) I had to let off steam. (I'm unafraid of the harrowing human experience, always beginning, coming like a corollary thick as molasses. Yeah, yeah..)

It's a pleasure, a belated and weird pleasure, that Al Franken has been declared winner of his Senate seat on what should be the eve of his six month freshman anniversary.

There's a messed-up embedment of sly, failed masculinity translated from when realpolitik kicks in during one's youth with hyacinths: Capital martyrdom: Historical subjectivity smothered by permanent gender discomfort, male or female. The sight of Bruce Willis loosens some stitches. Willis, Stallone, William Hurt. Also Steven Seagal is a huge, nominal failure. We're waiting for their last movie, the one about Seagal paying Willis, Stallone and Hurt off (they pretend to be his protection team) so heroes four can whomp Lilia the Easter Cretaceous Bunny.

Four and half months of March-April...love it!

So it's apparent I've written most of a short essay this month on pantaloons. Like a poem, for me, a prose piece happens in stages and different sequences. I'd say by now the argument of the essay is laid out. Paragraphs 1; 2; 3 & 4; 5 & ff (to be edited); ante-penultimate; penultimate; last paragraph (I think it will be one paragraph) to come. Will finish soon.

Before cymbals rang and the first song reached the human ear, and long before verse was parsed, there were snores of ancestors and their coughs and grunts thundering in caves. Back then the body taught itself speech with shrieks and groans to signal pain, humming to sign comprehension and varietals of cognition. Cuddling together in dampened corners, our predecessors, given time, gave up other sounds moving their tongues and lips, expanding somatic-sonic repertoires into an output of contrivances to express feelings, humming first, lilting, orating, poeticizing, then, most abstract, writing stuff down, occasioning poetics. But only in the last hundred years or so, and regarding poetics, only in a fraction of recent years, did we learn, finally, to collect human emotions and temper individual will to instrumental gains in order to live within the ad agency. The ethos of clients and us first. Teamwork. Our people are what make us great. Our underground. Cave One.

Moreover. Or less. Let's see. How about a new brand? Save the world in one minute. Brief history of the ad agency as business model, and its impact on XXIst century poetics (first decade). Subtopics: Intramurals among principals and creatives (who are which? not always the same? etc.); growth marked by add-on strategic functions, media specialists, pr, brand mentoring, marketing research; evolution of adjunct strategists into stakeholders as the agency takes on more accounts -- curators, publishers, department heads as major accounts; readers, bloggers, and other friends-of-the-agency as secondary (but highly influential) clients; WPP Group as prototype of theory-conscious, esthetically-informed, globalized commercial collective; fish eating fish -- the parallels (//) concept-search swallows language, flarf, oulipo (flattery through affiliation -- a.k.a., cross-selling) // WPP eats Ogilvy, Grey, Young & Rubicam); actionable insights and data-based advice enable the agency to speak its clients' mind.

Switching personnel faster than Steinbrenner in his heyday, harriet perks up: Camille T. Dungy, Martin Earl, Annie Finch, Eileen Myles.

Frankly, until this weekend I thought Twitter and tweeting were ridiculous. Language reduced to bullets. Bullets of the moment to a supposed audience waiting to be shot with what? Hey, I'm walking south on Greenwich going to my favorite dairy restaurant. Eh, I just hopped on the elevator on four headed to the 12th.

But two bullets about tweeting this weekend have shifted my views. Protestors in Tehran succeeded through Twitter S.O.S. messages in exposing international media, especially CNN, in lackluster and spotty coverage of the Iranian election aftermath. May the protests and tweeting lead to something productive.

Meanwhile, poetics students at Penn are registering an increase in Twitter traffic featuring Joe Brainard's invention prompt "I remember." Brainard, ahead of his time, again. Brainard's topos, I remember, appeals to an American mindset. I'd describe that mindset as production-geared and prosaic at base, that is, atheoretical, factual, and inclined toward visuals and visual language cut out of everyday experience as empirical evidence: "I remember one of the very few times I ever got in trouble at school. I got caught doing drawings all over my hand with a ball point pen in music class." That mindset is a lasting form of protest, too.

I got married on my day off. Once. I don't know what to say. I have all the coverage I need. My gaze is met.

With or without roadside assistance you have to maintain respect for subsequent generations — no matter how they look or do.

Things are serpentine. All those tattoos halfway up the arm, over the shoulder. Like last year's t-fashion, with filigree computer-generated designs, tiny at the navel, flowering asymmetrically in a burst of excess around the neck. My goodness, glad that's done. Still, it's serpentine. The poetry scenes have converged on Chambers Street Station. (The MTA has assigned Chambers to poets. Can't say why, except it's a short sprint to so much.) Hey, it's crowded with groups, subgroups, couples. More of everyone. There was a spot, once, where poets could hold forth, shout out their conceptualisms. But now, thanks to PDAs and piled-up agendas, everyone's here and shouting, almost at once. Only a handful of still-discernible subgroups are taking time to listen (to one another). Shouts slither to the ceiling and up the stairwells. I wonder what the affect is at street level, on the roads out of town?

Down here we let this happen.

Still not having opened the book, I'll sign off on my perusal of Conceptualisms acknowledging its (perhaps) strongest argument, one that comes inside the phoneme s. By professing potential for more than one theoretical construct to conceptual text production, Venessa Place and Rob Fitterman strike down a narrower campaign that allows for conceptualism v. an everything- or anything-else. Conceptualisms introduces innumerable ideas behind (perhaps) competing spectra of conceptual approaches. The short order, then, is that s blows a hole through regulation of or authority for conceptual poem making. There is a plurality of conceptualisms, as the s demonstrates. Like good conceptualists, the authors of Conceptualisms make it easy; the gist of their commentary is texted instantly, phonemically. There are conceptualisms, there are flarfs, pieces of many practical approximations within poetics that have yet to be categorized with precision.