I once wrote a poem that began with the stanza, "Everexploding/ huminy, huminy/ beyond the northern point/ and flying." I posted it with perhaps a dozen others on an AOL website I think in 1997; I canceled my AOL membership a couple years ago (it’s 2002 as I write this), but the site is still up there, and I have no idea how to take it down. I don’t particularly like the poetry I used to write. I wish none of it were on the internet. But sometimes I think about that AOL site. Why haven’t they taken it down? It’s been two years since I was even an AOL member. Are they conspiring to keep my work before the world?—did a group of AOL webmasters get together and decide to humiliate me? Are there other sites out there, sites whose whole purpose is to make fun of my poems? Sometimes I think of conspiracies that are powerful, but even worse are the conspiracies that are powerless. You know, those underground conspiracies, those movements and secret organizations that nobody knows of—that you couldn’t find out about from TV and the newspapers. Perhaps I am famous to certain powerless illuminati who pass my subversive writing through an underground network and watch my every move, read my every email and novel. Perhaps that man I saw on the corner was one of them. You know, that man I saw standing on the street corner at 11 o’clock at night doing nothing but standing—but I haven’t told you about that yet. At first I took him for a hooker, then for an undercover vice cop. Finally, I decided the government was trying to entrap me for a crime so that I would no longer qualify for disability; of course the INS has been trying to deport me for years (they believe I was born in Mexico, while I was really born in California). But perhaps none of this is the real reason that man was standing on the corner late at night, doing nothing but standing. Perhaps the real reason has to do with those mysterious AOL webmasters who for whatever reason won’t delete my poetry from their server, and seem to be willing to keep it up there forever.