[Newspoetry] Newspoem Kidnapped, Held Hostage

[Mike Lehman]

While visiting Chicago to inaugurate the ELO's Interactions series,
Newspoem /2001/0902.html was apparently kidnapped and held hostage. The
innocent little Newspoem was dicovered missing at 0001 Central Daylight
Time when she didn't check in after a wild weekend where she was last
seen in the company of William Gillespie and Scott Rettberg. Not that
they are suspects in this diappearance, but their long prior history of
seducing words and tricking them into groups and stanzas made them the
authors that the Chicago Word Police sought to interview when reports of
the disappearance began to circulate late Sunday evening, Spet. 2.

A ransom note was found posted on an obscure website maintained by the
World Church of The Creative Writer, an infamous, style-manual-wielding
reactionary group that insists on proper English being used wherever the
English language is invoked. It demanded a return to the proper use of
"who" and "whom" for all fifth-grade children and the re-installation of
a Princess Illiniwek, who will simulate sex with Chief Illiniwek
whenever the Fighting Illini fall behind on the field of athletics this
football season. She will also bring him his pipe and moccasins at
half-time so that he can relax after that oh-so-stressful dance.

Although the young rebels Gillespie and Rettberg are seemingly cleared
by this development, other sources point to an insidious plot that may
have been hatched in order to reveal the hideout of Dirk Stratton, an
associate of the aforementioned duo who is reputed to have ascended into
Heaven somewhere in southeast Ohio in recent years. The FBI believes
that this was a sham diappearance fabricated to spare the country from a
proposed Unknown Cannonball Coast-to-Coast Run, propelled by high-octane
gas and illegal literary stimulants, which was called off when it was
discovered that it might throw the 2000 election to the Texas miscreant,
George W. Bush.

Cie la vie, eh?