Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara
Man, you did a lot before
we spilt you at 40
for it all to be the randomness
of your aesthetic
What does this mean for us?
Are you asking me to deduce things?

One gasp in your fortunate day at
the nerve center of the empire,
you made a hiccup about why you,
Polloc buddy, didn't paint,
and the echo of the noise drew me into
your 500-page collection
The devil does not
randomly collect,
though it's part of his sales spiel
that he was just in the area

This poem is going nowhere
because I wanted one about you
when I was exhausted from reading

I played her Gustav Holst's Venus
She hugged me with her warm body, 27 and softly naked, in our bed
From my chest she told me the music was liquid emotion
Two thousand years later, I affixed goggles and plunged
from the dark C-47 air transport, recalling my chores back in Iowa,
praying to my chute,
into the night above the wounds of Normandy,
and replied it was liquid imagination

Cat Rhetoric

The wet, emburred coat (striped orange)
is the Zapruter film
rained down and relinquished
by the mowed turf,
gesticulating its self-evidence,
with a Warren Report as
plausible as the clumsy truth
of kitten Stan's
A.W.O.L. scurry from the home
Stan's here in the dog bed by some chance
when we get home and begin
to blink, totaling certainties in a slow phrase
He's dry eerily soon, but, poker-faced,
changes the subject with
indisputable squawks for his dinner

O Dark Knight

Maybe we can throw off fear
and wars no longer work because
commanders can't convince us
to run with weapons at each other
Maybe enough people will memorize
the the ending of The Dark Knight: the Joker
telling two bombrigged ships of hostages
it's the only way to save themselves
to detonate each other, but they refuse
They obliterate the villain's certainty
Many kids who might enlist someday
know that scene. Good.
Maybe that's why Heath Ledger died,
killed himself to get the film a good turnout
He probably faked his death
Now he's searching for the right time to return
from his windy island in the south Atlantic
He'll wait a year or two more
then make a heavy reemergence at a red carpet event,
foundation melting down his face in the bulb flashes
And the nascent churches to him are dumbstruck
Then some off-kilter avenger kills him for not being dead