i prefer to be abstract. this way i avoid the pedantry which i hate,

and am able to accept and insist on being hypocritical.

i need to just be because being one thing and telling everybody

that youre that one thing is absurd in no productive sense atoll.

Seems to me as soon as you name something its already dead.

so dont ask what i mean. ever.

i will just tell you to do something silly,

or give you some nonspecifics. like this :

“My program is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its

inundation. To read it and in reading, order it to read myself.”

[Stephen Rodefer, preface to Four Lectures, 1982]

if i wrote this before, i would probly include something like

“ My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they

are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no

one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it

has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but

I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow

eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious.

On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am

needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so

great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.”

[Frank O’hara, from Meditations in an Emergency, 1957]

but now, i would provide this :

“we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in

San Francisco even we just want to be rich

and walk on girders in our silver hats

I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is

thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi

and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go

back to work happy at the thought possibly so”

[Frank O’hara, from “Personal Poem”, 1959-64]

i always think hard. i really like arguments, and music is great.

especially Jonathan Richman and Tom Waits. the problem is its all been done

already and music isnt music anymore, or just im too thought up to praise

anything thats not really original. thats the hard part about starting anything

is that why should i add to the garbage and am i a better critic, i can see

whats not and i see all that as consumption and arrogance and i dont know

why, i would never tell anybody not to do something. I guess what im sayin

is me and mine got no roots and dont know what we are and where we came

from. when all the fathers in the worldtake your body and mind, its hard to

believe its yours when you finally get it back. Im not scared of the beatings,

just the joy. the beatings are more real.

i love you all, dont be afraid.