But it seems that the electric company, for all their dealings with lamps and light bulbs, are really not very bright.

Apparently they didn't understand the note I sent them. Otherwise they wouldn't have responded by asking for even more payments, when I'd already paid with the sonnet.

Who knows what they thought of the sonnet. They didn't send it back.

That doesn't happen too often. When a poem of mine goes out and doesn't even come back to me—well, it feels strange. Like a defective boomerang.

Now, between you and me, the electric company has a big secret. And they're very afraid it will be brought to light. Which makes them kind of uptight, I've discovered.

To show them I was wise to their game, I took off my sweatshirt and rubbed it on my head for a while, until my hair was all crackly and standing on end. I shook the sweatshirt over the NO POSTAGE NECESSARY envelope until I was pretty sure it was full of electrons. I wrote:

Dear Electric Company,

I KNOW YOUR SECRET.

Maybe I can't quite figure out how you concentrate the stuff and squeeze it through two little slits in the wall, but I do know that electricity is everywhere. You get it out of the water and the air and the sun, out of rocks and trees, even out of dinosaurs that have nothing better to do than lay around dead. Why, just the other day the sky got so over-supplied with electricity, it didn't know what to do with all the surplus. So it started tossing electricity from cloud to cloud, like a lightning bolt juggler. It was careless and dropped a lot of the lightning bolts, which came crashing down to the ground. That didn't trouble the sky, though; it had more electricity than it knew what to do with and was happy to get rid of some.

See, electricity is everywhere. Maybe not everyone knows this, and you're taking advantage. I just don't see how you can arrive at a price of 120 dollars for something that's all over the place. Seems kind of arbitrary, if you ask me. Well, so: I've put a price of 150 dollars on my poem, which I think you'll agree is a bargain, seeing as my poem is not everywhere but is in fact one of a kind (well, two of a kind, because I kept a copy as a receipt).

Please note that my account is now paid up. Overpaid, in fact. And I would appreciate if you would refund me the 1.5 haiku that, according to my records, you owe me.