Poetry is blood sport. The point can be evaded but there's no simple way to address this. Poetry is transmitted didactically. It is a blood transmission. It messes with the brain. During a hurricane Charles Olson stands at the proscenium of the Universalist meeting house on the flat of Beacon Hill. The blood pumping through John Wieners's brain is altered. Jack Spicer screams insults on Blabbermouth Night at 1546, and any traces of neoacademicism are rinsed from the mind of Lewis Warsh. Y (Ashbery; Myles) dates Z (Auden; Yau) and the ablative movement toward post-X (Stevens; Ashbery) is initiated. The transmission is of manners and prospects, licensed by something close to bipolar disorder. Feelings are Matterhorns. Nothing to / with you. The mind starts running zu fiel and the possibilities are not one's anymore. It is to poetry one turns, gets hip, poetry one cheats on, because one's life is a discipline, finding the bloodline. You assumed I was gay. Why?

These two giggling Chinese fellows in rags have a calculated, even clinical, take on enthusiasm and its competitive impulses, blushing, shrieky reception, pronounced excitement. Enthusiasm, as they see it, sprints to dissipation, weariness and vulgar indifference. When it comes to poetry, to enthuse is to ingest the crystal meth of critical discourse. Pumped-up prescriptions motivate more occasion for empurpled, exaggerated discernment premised on communal half-truths, that beauty is to be weaponized, for example, that every exchange is work. Those are common enough warrants for social climates in which enthusiasts manage and strategize. An ideal collected poems spanning a career of an enthusiast would and does constitute such a climate, and would and does entail, if not disclose names of, people and events that inform readers how to vote for the best poems based on issues. What issues? That brings us to poetry bloodlines that have nothing to do with the impulses or the panic of desire. Signed, Devo

Pants in, brow furrowed out.

Dangerously dour, Altoids for breakfast.

Want to thank Citibank for all the bikes, travel and home accessories. (p 11)

I was waiting for confirmation Venezuela oil benefits a few million. (9)

The film The Village typed as dangerously dour, something I've been looking for. (31)

Many a time I've been shaken by a good woman who loses her temper. (102)

Don't need a lampshade just now. (27)

Pants in. (62)

About twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system. (92)

I outsource my wings to hell, thanks. (46)

We already know narrative is self conscious, vulnerable, nonlinear, looped and unstable. (p. 102)

We don't know if there is such a thing as a borough art scene, much less one that is growing in scale and ambition. (93)

We don't know if Francesco Clemente has run out of ideas. (71)

We no longer know the meaning of global citizenship, so we are uncertain whether ethnic identity can mingle with it. (63)

Propaganda is transhistorical and transnational. Really? (57)

A Pop icon is never unmediated. Don't say. (51)

Ghada Amer is beyond Bolly. (34)

We almost know it's impossible to escape from restatement of art-historical precedent. (33)

As it was in the beginning, early Chris Burden is old. (13)

I've emptied my mind. Begin your insane experiment. I love your work. I can feel the world stop. Hold on, my phone's vibrating. My old boyfriend. Is this your idea of fair? This is the you, a bump to the you were, did you, do you? I'm catching up on staff picks. And tomorrow, little I'll. Demolish the old free market of agitation. Brick me up into my cubicle. Impossible died uncradled and embedded, some reach! Sort of gifted, ok, house arrest. "Do we get hats," asked the rich lightweight with her, a day last week we came by to tell a whopping lie. Because it's not.

Sullivan, C has gone Chocko.

I'll never cross the room to talk to a single woman again.

I'm feeling I need them less and less.

The ache of summer is palpable, night is falling
As snorts of derision dampen my naïve
Representation of democracy. My parents never talk to me
About finding studs hidden behind the walls.

A chill is in the air. Winter will come,
So will mom and pop ninja, hot cocoa, chai, then the ax
Murders. Every night I wash my nails. I dream mom and pop watch,
Pausing in the corridor. They soothe the hackles. Dream
On, pal.

[Hey, a comment. Nudge-nudge wink-wink sniff. Today I'm playing with tones*, including sounding straight. It's kinda cool for a day.]

*tones are like erections.

A piercing blue sky
Gentle ocean breeze
Low humidity, clean
Air.

Mother of Mercy,
I've decided like I won one
Against whatever long ago.
The will in which being utters
I decided in a whim, a touch.

Can this be the end of madness?
It's only ourselves I've decided
Out of dread and let it win
Against us, but enough, Rico,
Let's talk about them.

Surge but don't be crude, please.

There were errors. Details...

Father writes, my creativity
is not wasted in remorse.
What I owe: I know
almost and almost lost,
unfinished, in everything

I moved along a scratchy plain
of dandelions, peony, clover:
checked for snags of fern, fir,
and the only woman nodded: Oh yes

It's only your newness:
and I see the formalism
as I fill in the questionnaire
with you.

Reading report and a tale of bees, from Stephanie.

First, let's get a platform built.

The class clown gets elected treasurer. He enters business. Shadows. Lies.

A wedding thrives on repetition. One wishes you both looked good.

A collective battle heats up -- jacket length, lapels, the breast pocket. Inserting a handkerchief. Shaving twice a day. Does your dad look like this? You know a song's a hit when you've heard it so often you'll be happy never to hear it again. Memories come with a brightness held shoulder-high over the body. By turns pensive, nervous, mercurial, and polite, ex-lovers show up, finding ways not to be pains. Today we'll build armor plates and fail to mention the head scarf sinister facility makes and offer no suggestions for ameliorating after-effects, a flawed way to find one's career in performance hewing to the ethic. Wild-eyed, on the curt side, one feels naked in responses like all the others', all the room swept glowing and tiled back and forth mistily across an immense and distant daze, half of it waxing with the plump bride adorned along mortal circumstance.

How old was I then? 12 or 13. Pop's birthday was a red-letter affair for all the workers at Darn It Air Conditioning there in leafless aerospace. We wrote in complete metonymy. Our slogan was bodies of work change the world until only a style prevails. Everything bristles is another. The installation's like unwashed stowage, the return of. The hand shadows what these notes rarely mine in their slangy hypotheticals and colloquy of brotherhood and family that hardly cut it for genuine avantist rant. Clinging to objects, love songs on the other hand never miss, taken no more than once a day. Minutes after the work is filed, dozens stand eagerly in line for a treat, free run of the company-owned orchard, ripe with teenagers and herbal stress. "This is a very nice benefit," says one of the workers who flashes her ID to rum-soaked guards at the gate. The place has been wiped clean. Teens are not the only perk here.

Last, best, final. For the good of your person, family, the total airborne, hands down, if the Cardinals have a home game, you know where to find me crushing a hotdog on my forehead. My ideal is a strong communicator before advances begin. Talk is -- ex-man in Bloomington -- sexy. Trying to get high is a passion. (You might not be a good fit for me.) My father says clients often don't provide enough follow-through, afraid to ride around with us in public. Hey, Johnny Berryman, he says I worry too much because my rewrite describes me telling you what to eat, what to wear, where to go with a soul mate, a twinkle in your eye. Walking on the beach makes him want to scream, shut up, happy? The dating shows are turned off for good by a guy posing next to a big, fierce-looking boy. It reads like code for "I govern New Jersey." He should. Dad was a Marine guerrilla before customers started to pay $150 per phone chat. Since launching in July he's served 60, inflaming them and me, a delicate situation. But that doesn't make the highs any less tasty. Signed, Anne

Thanks for zilch. That's what men like my father, my father's age, were thinking, not saying it outright or not saying it much. Heads down, noses clean, hobos in bed a decade before the pill, a half a century before cialis, bossing, dreaming who're bossed, sexed out the top spot. You can phone him but don't wimp out. If you hang up, your throat's sliced. Your projects curtailed. A course of action by a player of zilch.

Folks were kind of less casual then. You know what I said? To the bank people. I don't want to pay for any of it.

The Disparities
Rodrigo Toscano
Green Integer 2002

Flak in politics or procreation? Who needs it: "flaring // re-spool // * // circuitousness // concreteness." Score one for the modest combatants stomping in dust. Toscano's found a list of things to improve before you get too old. I call this antihegemony, definitely not mimesis. Cull the tax ledgers. "Oh and 'mediators' turn up by the dozen / Pander tablets, constitutions that can't be cooked." Clarity quick-dawns. Let's call The Disparities gaping barbs. "Redemption? / Potent motif because zilch (ever) gets redeemed." Nothing personal, representation with out-(re)production, the wig-over-a-mohawk stamina of mechanical shopping, trial sublimates, hassled stupor. That's not cruelty, it's wages and deflation. Miss Muffy and her mark Dickey "Bones crushed. Cannot move." Representations of blimp paternity; dad's not visible; eggs "bonded." Teachers are wardens (natch), suburbs glow in strangeness ("excessive absences"), poetics and "a direct violence" blaze until fear and trust consume California, "incense // of common sense // clearing."

Driving a Van in August

The horseshoe broken open
Lay in sun

Achilles at his booming tide
Kept there. Was there.

Renaissance dunes
Lounged a soba color

That rubbed collapsing sank
Dullness tangled

Like Myrmidons.
Ooooo

Lassitude -- don't worry about it
It's probably just a head cold

Why bother the headdress of drifted hair.
I never mentioned this but I feel pretty itches

Something to disrupt the view
Something broken -- inside

Embedded satire about the war
New pressures faced into lingering of a man

You know what I think?
Damn sumbitches

I can suck up to you-
R voodoo.

Glows in the dark. What kind of girl are you?

How about 'faith' in mimesis! Could things get any crazier?

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