Dream Vision of Frank O’Hara

    it is 4:40 and I’m drenched in moonstone, sequins, fishnets, and general getting-out
    of-bedness at the corner of 11th Avenue and 30th hoping for something hum-colored.
    get in, you say, we’re looking for goldenrod! your broken nose points toward the gilded
    remnants of Saturday. It’s the night like I love it all cruisy and nelly and we toast to our only
    pain being champagne, how life is a series of bad haircuts and witticisms, a long drag
    on a short cigarette. jujubes! Finnegans Wake! honey, turn me into viscous paint: de
    Kooning, demolition, technicolor taboos. that’s so dada how the oil leak, no! my
    eyeliner, resembles a Kline. I’m sort of gutter rat: folding a slice and spilling the hottubs
    of pepperoni onto the sidewalk but trust me, I can do a time-step: be your Ginger.
   offer bland remarks like Mae. you force feed me bleu cheese olives, blintzes, reels of
   celluloid to hurry along my refinement. I ask why you never read me your poems and
   you say it’s like inhaling your own flatulence. just like that. be a little discreet in your desire,
   disorder, dying. you fill my coupe with restlessness and myselves split, undulate. one of
   me buys the Strega. one of me is in a freak accident. one of me is skin-shedding on the
   High Line. I can’t even enjoy a blade of afterlife unless I know there’s a subway handy.
   did you ever imagine your bohemian freight trains would be my railroad ecology, yellow foxtail
   and hawkweed? must Manhattan be fleeting, fabricated, a gold-leafed dream? by now
   my cheeks hurt—heart eyes, no-moss mind—but we can’t stop brooding about our
   mothers, those useful thorns. suddenly the skyline is brushed across with a silk salmon
   scarf and you reach for it like the Sistine Chapel but of course the Staten Island Ferry
   shows and do I have to go when we’re having so much fun