she liked this one; asked me to give it a title, so i did

[fflo]

Her nickname, Pazuzu, came from La démon de la Tour Eiffel, a graphic novel by Jacques Tardi.

           Pazuzu's Poets

           "I thought the headline today was
           `Poet union offers to return to
           work.' Too bad it wasn't."
                    --PAS, .plan of 10/09/02


   Paula, i do like the idea of the poets' union
   flexing its muscles, bringing society to a halt
   by refusing to spin verse until conditions improve

   there'd be scansion havoc & a gridlock of enjamb
   ments & zeugma might even defect from syllepsis

   next thing you know all onomatopoeia could
   disappear below the surface of a sea of prosaicness

   clunky thick theorists, hooked on the constant echo
   of their poststructuralist pontifications, would
   wantonly cross the poets' delicate lines without
   so much as a caesura of chagrin, wanking on
   as usual of signifiers and the signified, ontology
   and contextualism and semiotic ya-ya, their metaphors
   all clogged up together in puffy somnolent sentences,
   their souls indifferent to the rapid drying up of imagery,
   the flat-lining of sprung rhythm, the death of deliberate
   idiosyncratic diction and joyful juxtaposition


   i'm telling you, it would be ugly

   we really ought just capitulate & give the poets
   whatever they so eloquently may demand