Thanks for posting the poem, Andrew. The "leetspeak" (officially, "l33tspeak") issues might be worth talking about, Gregory, and also the fleeting popularity of social networking sites.
When the poem was in proofs at
Comstock Review (early 2008?) the editor wrote me a note saying that his middle-school-age son had approved of seeing l33tspeak in a poem. The strangely spelled slang is not much seen now, at least not by me. I don't know if that's only because the young people I know have passed beyond that, or because its popularity has shifted or waned.
And when I wrote the poem, it was titled "LJ Stalker," LJ being short for LiveJournal. But commenters steered me to "MySpace Invader" both because it was clearer and because MySpace was the up-and-coming site. It's long since been superseded by FaceBook.
So here I am, wondering whether I should take this dated three-year-old poem out of the book manuscript that has been making the rounds
