OK, so Mr. Collins will be my target one last time.
Now, this is actually a parody of a parody because--
so Billy Collins wrote a poem called "The Day Lassie Died".
Now, if you're familiar with the work of Frank O'Hara,
you'll know that this is a parody of O'Hara's famous poem,
"The Day Lady Died", about Billie Holiday.
So Collins wrote a poem that was about Lassie.
So I've rewritten Collins's rewriting of O'Hara.
This is "Chinese Silence Number 23".
"It is 12:20 AM in Beijing, a Thursday,
two months after the bicentennial of our nation.
Yes, it is 1976, and I write some
poems that sound like what a third-rate Wallace
Stevens would think up after getting off
the 7:15 in Hartford and then not even bother writing down
before going into dinner.
I step into Yu Hu's New York Chinese cafe and have egg foo
young and moo shu pork and open my ugly fortune cookie
to see what the poets in China are saying these days.
[LAUGHTER]
I go on to the laundry, and Mr. Lee-- first name or last name?
Who knows-- hands over my shirts with a side of silence.
And in the Chinatown oriental bookstore,
I get a little Li Po with erotic drawings for myself
along with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
And I don't see On Contradiction or Serve the People.
I keep my eyes on Li Po and fall into an exotic silence.
And to assure my future as poet laureate,
I stroll into a Buddhist temple and ask them
if they will help me shovel snow.
And they tell me to go back where I came from.
So I walk out with a carton of incense,
and some lady slaps me with a little red book with his name
on it.
And I am crying a lot now and thinking
of urinating in the alley behind the Four Spot
while he rose from his bed to shake
the hand of Dick Nixon and everyone and I fell silent."