Here's a tablespoon of cod liver. Post-melanoma, John McCain aims to end tax incentives encouraging businesses' subsidizing health insurance for employees, and shift toward tax credits for individuals to purchase coverage. He'll have to back off this floater, as he had to retreat from his crazed idea of a 100-year occupation of Iraq, but meantime it's comforting to see he wants to lose this election almost as much as Obama and Clinton. A cold tease, McCain wants to dissuade corporations from looking after their workers. In other words, he'd eviscerate one of the few American institutions, job-based insurance, that bears faint resemblance to social democracy. The ex-hostage would turn the whole enterprise over to market forces, as if this were the United States of Darwin. The (potential) consumer would determine her course of action. Find your own, sicko. It's cod liver and payback. Mr. Nasty wants you to suffer just as he suffered.

With regard to the Supreme Court's upholding Indiana's Voter ID Law, a piece of legislation passed by Republicans exclusively, the ruling finds no evidence of either voter fraud, the apparent motive for the law, or a burden placed on voters by the law. Untouched by anecdotes about those eligible refused ballots, the Court majority allowed lack of "concrete" data documenting burden to trump a complete lack of data showing any fraud. One consequence of Justice Stephens's majority finding of no "evidence of the burden imposed on voters who now lack photo identification" is that it will take a decade or longer to compile proof. That would add up to many hundreds or more impeded in exercising or denied their rights to vote. Within the next ten years, in addition to seven states that now require photo id's, other states will enact similar restrictions -- that also seems certain now. To rescind voter id laws, a question for the immediate term is who will take on the responsibility to amass evidence of burden. A longer term question, one for not only historians and legal scholars but also US senators who pass on new justices, is when will the analytical narrative on the antipopulist and indeed recidivist bias of the Court enter public discourse so that bodies politic can concentrate on reversing the occupation of the Third Branch by judges given to partisanship and callous reasoning. The majority opinions were signed by men who, in this case, prefer to protect a process against the specter of fraud than guarantee citizens their constitutional rights for clear access to that process.

My boss sucks.

That's because she wants to. She has to. Some job titles are, as the expression goes, anathemas. Disquiet raising the roof. Boss, leader, principal, chair, honcho, prexy, director, master chef, officer in charge, head of the shift. What does it take to earn and maintain these titles? Ideology. Casting spells. Constantly interviewing every employee, member, affiliate, colleague, collaborator, associate sans souci. Even an emperor-operator-intellectual wearing that bandolier of inclusiveness and inviting debate can and likely will carve you down to size -- as electric pink Mao and his gang did, achieving greater equity for their rule.

The long reach.

I'm antitheocratic, not an Episcopalian. I'm prejudiced and unqualified then to pronounce the Church of England a running joke, founded though on the whim of a killer monarch whose adrenal surge happened to resonate with and gave temporal staying power to new theories of moral force vis a vis the pope's. That power is inchoate doctrinally but it effected empire, linguistic hegemony, and facts-on-the-ground style that in back-formation lend pragmatic weight to authority. The pope is another anathema, along with the caliph, the chief rabbi, and the lesser sergeant at arms, the lieutenant general, the vice admiral, the sub-provost, and, o springtime, der Führer. Lower-ranked authorities regularly take on the conflation chores of cult dictators. The New York Times reports an ex-Baptist soldier in Iraq was threatened by US military officers because of his professed atheism. He is one of 5,500 in the service who have complained about such discrimination. These incidents most often reflect bias toward Christian evangelical views held by the chains of command.

I'm my own boss.

People believe in miracles. I'm kidding. I have no boss. I work for myself. There are bosses out there. Still, it's the bosses inside, the psycho-analogs, that register: nonverbal monitors of sensory and motor operations standing up to see the wall unit, hearing you read, tasting brie, walking home in idle suspense, smelling something, falling asleep; talky administrators of social filters meddling closer to the verbal core, editing prose, keeping everything tidy; above them, less of an allover presence, one or more crisis managers of sorts, perhaps figments of what Freudians describe as superego mostly whizzing silently on automatic, now and then shaking a finger up in the brain and mumbling something half-received and half-worked-out for the moment -- be warned when she fakes her climax and wants you to put it in writing. The tribal warlords above superego are fleeting, hard to perceive, even though fossilized -- in a way -- in entabulature thrown down to us as iconic, historical features of a heritage we never asked for and cannot live without, a wide collection of human good and awful stuff like the signing of the Magna Carta and the slaughter of the Saracens. Point is I can't get rid of the entabulature and at times it tries to boss me. No, but seriously, I'm going to have to eat it, and it pops back up (or in), the amazing wait while I figure out the plumage of something hitherto never thought of.

You're right. Humiliate to me in my mouth. Begin with the mother tongue on iTunes, write down all our emotions from the Renaissance with pedophiles. In sex I love: will obey. (Not only on the runway but also in the crate.) The last things you need are actual notes. A lack of complexity makes us swarm around like a misogyny compound. I'm in 12 parts. You're American take home food. A thick gnome in a Brahmsy nightmare tends to center and cultured individuals. Everyone is polygamous these days. Now I want it slower, thinly constituted, and you're wearing the compound!

A word like trounced appears. Mindless. Lost. These candidates, Obama included, play by old rules, the usual half-naked speeches. Obama for the first time looks defeated. All three are wrong, now. Their guts show in the wrong places. What's stranger, not wearing a flag pin or talking about it? Unless Obama comes up with a theory of everything in his brain, he'll disappear into the plutocracy. I feel badly beaten by Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, and Massachusetts, to name a few tax bases. The process this time looks unprecedentedly dumb.

Books ship Tuesday.

Another poet in need: Tom Clark.

If you regularly check out Michael Scharf's blog you can pick up good habits like Tracie Morris.

To live in anachrony.

Sometimes a new reader comes here for the right reason. All comers are welcome, needless to say, even a near-miss equipped with emotionally restorative ideas that pop out of a wild web search. I especially appreciate getting linked to exotica and data as uplifting as "Tits, Ass and Hanna," "miss shari029," "HighHeelsMousy," and "Kristy Blue ... footjob." These results, from a recent submission to a Czech search engine for NYLONS BALLOONS SEX, seem resonant with my "rainwear fetish," which I almost forgot I had.

Amazon inhabits a low-lying area. It and its print production unit BookSurge are now riding roughshod over the POD industry by intimating that they will cut off small- and medium-scale publishers that use nonaffiliates for printing books. In other words, Amazon aims to commandeer the pipeline from production to sales. As is fairly obvious by assessing other creative industries, films, television, music, if small press book marketing integrates with manufacturing, the ivory tower, aka editorial -- that is, a good chunk of creative taste-making / decision-making -- stands ready to fall under the control of entrepreneurial influence, such as that of Amazon Web Services, AWS, Inc.

The obvious has been in place for some time now. As a small press publisher I found it hugely unprofitable to partner with Amazon two or three years ago. After forwarding dozens of copies of several titles and 'selling' all of them, I wound up owing Amazon money because of commissions and registration fees. I was asked to pay for Amazon's profiting from my labor and production. That's a foretaste of the lowlife of the small press publisher of the future who for 'prestige' or for some other rationalized motive chooses (or is coerced) to print and market with AWS.

All my spam is luxury.

Hey why can't Obama just come out and say it. We're all Pennsylvanians -- we're bitter and free! Come on out, Obama, give us your suit-as-silhouette (Get Smart, the revival); hang it off your boney shoulders; hold your chin up, debate like the Lower Ninth, smack grandma (Rocky) back to her Crown Royal; touch us in the cling spot, Obama, god and guns have their place but we all have a say, not just the bosses, the clergy, the senators, the generals -- do this for the poor, the rural, the numerous khaki-colored middle, the urban could-be hipsters -- shine my good man.

The strategy has been wait and see. Keep watch and wait until there's a mistake to pounce on. So. I'm losing it. If Clinton wins her nomination hectoring and hacking Obama, plying media tactics ripped out of Lee Atwater (Carl Rove's Ur-guru), the vote is kaput. Kerflooey. Kerplunk. Gonna pack up and exercise that lease option under a rock in Vallon Pont d'Arc.

It makes no difference what I believe. My soul is a hypothesis. A fish out of water surfing the interstate to destroy itself. I begged it to learn to swim, to stick with a sublime subject or object, to rally for more than the brass urn holding a spray of flowers, silently grinning under god. The living remains what I want to see, but there's nothing new rolling across the hill away from the rest stop, just an overwhelming offense of briquettes in the grill, each pheromone created to make a foreboding sensation, a direction to step up and out, keeping one foot in the academic and creative media left wing, the other in the fish's gut...

Last days for the Faux Chaps pre-publication offer. Tremendous response so far. Order today if you're inclined, and save a few.

...and your praise... was not entirely true, it turns out.

-- Dennis Cooper

Beautiful.

That is not what kind of emerged.

-- Ambassador Ryan Crocker

April 3

Giving pedicures is fun.

Brown hair is replacing blonde, according to a flier. It's sweeping the nation.

Dozens of spoofers or are they just trifles?

Aw, my guest room is the office.

You forgot which side.

Also a sweep, tattooed lads, heavy ink from either coast. They look seriously under-schooled, still, you would like to think, innocuous. Dumb and innocent, USA's best, the future! There's a tattoo for that pulpiness, sure. Promote your event.

And what was that all about? Years of talk and no improvement. All new moves, new, exuberant, an event planner who became a poet. Clinically proven.

Teacher, there's no one to sell to any more. More. This is a professional sport. Advanced techniques for victory, ready to go, a nabob of vocabulary.

Oh, look at this.

Wal-Mart carries vibrating skins now, battery powered. It's in the ring around the tip. They're from a respected source, old man, Trojan.

Attraction is ignited by deep compatibility.

I'm not a prose-poet, this is reportage, dude.

Draftsman Rene means Elliott, not Mark, Spitzer, but you can't blame a 65-year-old ex-rich kid for mixing the swimmers up. Besides, that's gold paint fleck in his eyes.

Thank you, thank you, Geof Huth for your better hearing and much better computer audio. I cranked up my Mac G4, and still could not decipher a lot of what Joe Dunn was saying, as noted March 31. Geof reports that Joe is reading Robert Creeley's "Desultory Days" from Later. Here's what Geof discovered, from what he wrote me in an e-mail yesterday:

A few weirdnesses with the reading. It's as if he's [that is, Joe is] reading it for the first time. He reads "yon" as "you," and "reneges" as "rennigays," and skips words here and there, including an entire stanza.

But what I liked most is when he stops to exclaim that Creeley is rhyming. Creeley used rhyme in weird inconstant ways, but he sure rhymed plenty, especially for a poet of his era (ours).

Geof touches on a couple of endearing qualities to Joe's performance. Joe reads "Desultory Days," something he's had to have read and reread many times, as if reading 'for the first time.' This is not surprising to Joe's friends. Joe needed to be astonished by a piece of work, had to be overtaken by it as though he had never seen or heard anything like it before. Insight was key, and Joe could bring out something new in what he read, even if it were poetry he already knew and admired. The video I've linked to is proof of this, even if Joe's words are not clear to the computer-impaired. Secondly, Joe, the pedagogue, was nonstop. Consider in the context of a public event where readers are expected to feature their own work, Joe choose poetry by someone far more famous. Further, Joe is compelled to interrupt his reading to underscore feats of prosody, attempting positions of both the interpreter and cheerleader. Geof, I think, knows something about these dual roles.

Jonathan Mayhew writes more about conscientious translation than most anything else, but this -- If the floor is more or less fixed, the ceiling is infinite -- measures the spectrum of his scruples. A short post with many quotables, including this about a mediocre approximation: all you're really doing is protecting yourself against the translation police, ensuring that nobody will find a howler.

Three more samples from Faux Chaps (special offer expires soon) --

I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination is nothing short of necessary. The most idle looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.

-- CAConrad, (Soma)tic Midge

~~~

Lacing My Skates

When I turned around and saw him, that was it. I knew as soon as I looked, that is the man I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. Burgundy cashmere V-neck. Silver watch by... I wasn’t sure, and if you’re new to this, you might be worried about h.i.v. and the smell, too, because that’s what a pure toy has to do. Worry. Sniff all over. My balls sway when I let them, flavored with cholesterol.

-- Jack Kimball, Pathologies

~~~

This gets better the product gets better
Thick pink slabs of pork and loads of butter
Opinionated, loaded, smart foolhardy and

Stereoscopic project facility
Hollyhock bolt the sky still holds vituperrious
Haven not dog, Martin Luther King Junior or lawn

Sister is tuberous not morose monkey fingers
Promotion of vision civic duty, a documentary
To instill fright in the most steely taller bubbly

Make amends with insects because they watch our
Every move
I feed them and they need no cloth we reside

Who’d be foolish enough to give up
Loving women as a storm impales a gaze
This form will become norm predation ease

Relapse irk ooze substantiate
Delicate tower of flesh
Harvest diskette docket wild unsubstantiated desire

To be
Shall we want to fuck
Kindly move these Christmas cacti

-- Brenda Iijima, Subsistence Equipment