To: NY With Love, Frank O'Hara ~ Rhapsody in Black & White

Poem 5:15 Madison Avenue portal to heaven? doors to perception stopped realities and eternal licentiousness festers in the jungle of impossible eagerness your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables swing from the myth of ascending meaning I would join or condemn your declining challenge of racial tensions and coming attractions of death they zing on (onto the lynch-pin, dear friends) while everywhere love is breathing heavily in a doorway linking 53rd with 54th east-bound with west-bound traffic by minions O downtown funnels, with your drunken bottlenecks O midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland

where is the summit where all aims are clear to pin-point the light upon fear and lust agony's needlework of antagonists grows up around the unicorn and fences him for milk- and yoghurt when I see Guliani I know he's thinking of John Ericson playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor sucking down sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire and my eyes water achingly imitating the true fire

a sight of Manahatta in the towering rubble multi-faceted insight of the fly in distress balancing on a stringless labyrinth

Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building I get into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue the Negro driver tells says about a $120 apartment "where you can't walk across the floor after 10 at night not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs" no, I don't like that "well, I didn't take it" perfect in the hot humid vacancy on my way to work a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods

you were there always and you know all about these things as indifferent as an encylcopedia with your calm brown eyes it isn't enough to smile when you run the gauntlet you've got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or Victoria Falls or gush the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar that is what you learn in the early morning from passing cars on Madison Avenue where you've never spent any time in the stores eat up the light as it disappears between the grey buildings I have always wanted to be near it randomly reflected here or there though the day is long (and I don't mean Madison Avenue) lying in a hammock on St. Mark's Place sorting my poems in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island of shit they are coming and we holy ones must go to Tibet, historically a part of China as I hysterically belong to the enormous bliss of American decay

1959

Miles Davis - So What

https://youtu.be/zqNTltOGh5c

dr. π (pi)

enjoy!