Well, the "Last Lie" was a strange rip-off of Keats.
You recognize that, right?
But just having fun with the dead.
OK.
I call this a haibun.
That is this Japanese poetic prose form punctuated
by fits of verse so haibun.
"Song of the Sad Guitar."
"In the bitter year of 1988, I was
banished to San Diego, California
to become a wife there.
It was summer.
I was buying groceries under the yin and yang sign of Safeway.
In the parking lot--
in the parking lot the puppies were howling to a familiar tune
on a guitar plucked with a zest and angst of the '60s.
I asked the player her name.
She answered, 'Stone Orchid.
But if you call me, that I'll kill you.'
I said, 'Yes, perhaps Stone is too harsh for one with a voice
so pure.'
She said, 'It's the orchid I detest.
It's prissy, cliche, and forever pink.'
From my shopping bag I handed her a Tsingtao
and urged her to play on.
She sang about hitchhiking around
the country, moons and lakes, homeward honking geese, scholars
who failed examination, men leaving for war,
women climbing the watchtower.
There were courts, more courts, and innermost courts and scions
who pillaged the country.
Suddenly I began to feel deeply about my own banishment,
the singer I could have been, what
the world looked like in spring, that Motown collection I lost.
I urged her to play on.
Trickle, trickle, the falling rain.
Ming, ming, a deer lost in the forest.
Surru, surru, a secret conversation.
Hung, hung a dog in the yard.
Then she changed her mood to a slower lament,
trilled a song macabre about death,
about a guitar case that opened like a coffin.
Each string vibrant, each note a thought.
Tell me, Orchid, where are we going?
'The book of changes does not signify change.
The laws are immutable.
Our fates are sealed,' said Orchid.
The song is a dirge and an awakening.
Two years after our meeting I became deranged.
I couldn't cook, couldn't clean.
My house turned into a pigsty.
My children became delinquents.
My husband began a long lusty affair with another woman.
The house burned during a feverish Santa Ana.
And I sat in a pink cranny above the garage singing
at 20 I marry you, at 30 I begin hating everything that you do.
One day while I was driving down Mulberry Lane,
a voice came over the radio.
It was Stone Orchid.
She said, 'This is a song for an old friend of mine.
Her name is Mei Ling.
She's a warm and sensitive housewife now living
in Hell's Creek, California.
I've dedicated this special song for her,
'The Song of the Sad Guitar.'
I am now beginning to understand the song within the song,
the weeping within the willow.
And you out there walking, talking seemingly alive may
truly be dead and waiting to be summoned by the sound of the sad
guitar."