Frank O'Hara
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 spectaclesCollection: New York
Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get upCollection: Party
I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!Collection: Want
If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky, and the snow looks up like a face dirtied with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself frozen fast in wintry eyes.Collection: Meaningful
After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousness you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?Collection: Nice
Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!Collection: Integrity
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.Collection: Beautiful
I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.Collection: Love You
It may be the coldest day of The year, what does he think of That? I mean, what do I? And if I do, Perhaps I am myself again.Collection: Mean
There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so.Collection: Hands
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, KerouacCollection: American Poetry
There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.Collection: Orange
I take this for myself, and you take up the thread of my life between your teeth, tin thread and tarnished with abuse, you shall still hear as long as the beast in me maintains its taciturn power to close my lids in tears, and my loins move yet in the ennobling pursuit of all the worlds you have left me alone in, and would be the dolorous distraction from, while you summon your army of anguishes which is a million hooting blood vessels on the eyes and in the ears at that instant before death.Collection: Moving
I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile.Collection: Century