Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the **** Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

by,
FRANK O'HARA

don't feel sorry for me.
I am a competent,
satisfied human being.

be sorry for the others
who
fidget
complain

who
constantly
rearrange their
lives
like
furniture.

juggling mates
and
attitudes

their
confusion is
constant

and it will
touch
whoever they
deal with.

beware of them:
one of their
key words is
"love."

and beware those who
only take
instructions from their
God

for they have
failed completely to live their own
lives.

don't feel sorry for me
because I am alone

for even
at the most terrible
moments
humor
is my
companion.

I am a dog walking
backwards

I am a broken
banjo

I am a telephone wire
strung up in
Toledo, Ohio

I am a man
eating a meal
this night
in the month of
September.

put your sympathy
aside.
they say
water held up
Christ:
to come
through
you better be
nearly as
lucky.

Sometimes, instead of yelling
she would carve.
She had had a book on whittling since she was eleven,
but it never came off the shelf.
So one day,
in a fury,
she picked it up
randomly
and hurled it across the room
in anger.
After looking at it
laying against the wall
looking pathetic,
she picked it back up.

That's how she dealt with all
her feelings;
she carved them in wood.
But not in stone
because feelings
change.

good weather
is like
good women-
it doesn't always happen
and when it does
it doesn't
always last.
man is
more stable:
if he's bad
there's more chance
he'll stay that way,
or if he's good
he might hang
on,
but a woman
is changed
by
children
age
diet
conversation
***
the moon
the absence or
presence of sun
or good times.
a woman must be nursed
into subsistence
by love
where a man can become
stronger
by being hated.
I am drinking tonight in Spangler's Bar
and I remember the cows
I once painted in Art class
and they looked good
they looked better than anything
in here. I am drinking in Spangler's Bar
wondering which to love and which
to hate, but the rules are gone:
I love and hate only
myself-
they stand outside me
like an orange dropped from the table
and rolling away; it's what I've got to
decide:
**** myself or
love myself?
which is the treason?
where's the information
coming from?
books...like broken glass:
I wouldn't wipe my *** with 'em
yet, it's getting
darker, see?
(we drink here and speak to
each other and
seem knowing.)
buy the cow with the biggest
****
buy the cow with the biggest
****.
present arms.
the bartender slides me a beer
it runs down the bar
like an Olympic sprinter
and the pair of pliers that is my hand
stops it, lifts it,
golden **** of dull temptation,
I drink and
stand there
the weather bad for cows
but my brush is ready
to stroke up
the green grass straw eye
sadness takes me all over
and I drink the beer straight down
order a shot
fast
to give me the guts and the love to
go
on.
from "poems written before jumping out of an 8 story window" - 1966

If you had a more pretty name I would use it
You’d find it splattered all over in my blood your name in blood
You are fleshy like balloons like *** dolls they find in yellow celebrity cars
But I did do did do did do  love you
I don’t care that your head is filled with green pool water
I don’t care that any of Donne’s poetry doesn’t speak of you
I mean any of it. The weird sisters, the witches have done me in.
I want to boil your chick-flicks, your cheap religion, your bad vampire stories
And take the needle to the jugular, filled from the cauldron
If I fed you some of you to you you would say
“I think I’m going to be sick”
I would want to unroll my finger and point it at your face
And scream with my inside-voice
“Ah-HAH!” That’s meaningful. With the casket
you are deep and beautifully empty
We need more of you, I will clone you and rename you a thousand and one times
I want to crawl through the wet streets like you
Unconcerned and perfectly meaningless
Perfectly meaningless
*******, I am becoming, fitting to you and
I am crazy and
I want you to get this
So bad I feel bad, the lady-killer, the ****** unsexed puppeteer’s got nothing on you sugar; you are a plastic pie,
a blackberry one
Your name is always in pink bubble letters in my shrinking head
After I used the needle I will hide it in your bed
And when you bring shining boys from the night
And you don’t put on soothing **** music
It will ***** one of you
I hope you deflate and melt like a witch and scream and scare yourself
But all the magic will already be boring in my veins
And meanwhile I’ll be morphing in a back seat car
And under long trees shaking like unsettled cement in the yellow yellow low low street lights
Becoming that neon sign you want me to be but
You never told me what to be
**** this hurt, I’m getting cut with your miraculous hair, it feels like aluminum cans are slicing me in slow motion
I am a spiral like an orange peel
One time I saw one glued and it looked real but there was no fruit inside.
When I reached inside of you, not bleeding, you moaned and stiffened
I pulled out what you couldn’t reach with your fingers
If I told that story in all its details people would be grossed out
They would puke up each other’s hearts, be embarrassed of course and shove it back down
Some people just can’t hold their hearts
I felt like a doctor who cross-dresses as a ****** lover at night. What ****** man is that?
I come out breaking through the windshield without my monarch *****-wings
I come out with my head full of demonology and Cosmopolitan ***-tricks, babyblue thoughts
And knowledge about hunting
I am ten feet tall, my jaw gets squared
I don’t eat ***** and I sleep well at night.
I don’t trouble your patterns, my hair and eyes are bible-black
And we wake up to fair-weather
When you let me, I wear your skin and inside I have near death experiences
You come three times a night and
we own a color T.V.

There is a consumer product demon
in the trash underneath my sink.

The other day, I tossed in a wrapper
from a Quest 20-protein-gram nutrition bar
and a hand reached up to grab it.

Thinking I was daydreaming
I pulled out the white plastic Rubbermaid trash basket;
no hand, but the ¼ cup of Kraft Fast Mac
tossed in yesterday was moving, undulating.

It made a distinct voice-y sound
like “You’ll like Mac-a-lot, so eat me!”
Thinking this was just my overactive poetic imagination
I turned to the sink.

My JetZScrubber had wrapped around a spoon
dancing in circles around the In-Sink-Erator drain
while the Ajax Easy-Hands Dishwashing Liquid spewed bubbles
in unison.

Now convinced I took too much acid in college
I ran upstairs where my dog Mr. Brown sleeps
on his 44” x 36” leopard-print GoodDogBed.
“Howdy, partner,” Brown chimed.
“Sure is a fine day to go for a walk
using that Halti multi-loop leader and Sprenger prong collar.
Yes, I love ‘em.”

I took Mr. Brown to the dog park.
the one with the Safe-Steel chain link fence
and the pine trees without labels.
He pooped in the sawdust and vocalized
in his hound voice.
I could have sworn he said,
“Glad I didn’t do that on the L.L.Bean Woven Nylon Area Rug,”
but I wasn’t sure.

Nothing moved
except the wind in the trees.
and I wondered what to call it.

These cold nights never seem to end
Alcohol's warmth is my only feeling
I wake up alone and look for a friend
This frozen heart has reached its end
Where once I knew I could always find
There is no shelter for this empty mind
Now it is black, and covered in snow
Cold and rejected, I walk home alone