Nicole BURROWS
Ode
to Frank O'Hara
"I Am Bored, But It's My Duty to be Attentive."
In Central Park, I saw you occur in the form of an elementary school soft balling around bases. I was laden with fruit someone vended to me from a small cart when I wasn't even thinking about food, much less fruit, which I hate.
Overwhelmed with everything, I ate when in retrospect I should have tossed the damn thing at the fourth grade, which made me happily think of a fruit in the first place. How strange to think about fruit more than I actually do taste it!
How for granted I take things! Your wallet, for example. And hayfever! Well I...I
Am at the moment, that sometime after when a snit of pretense and irrational exuberance twists me into a pity monologue, a platter of food maxims...On the field, sticks of gum are blewed by you. With a push of your tongue and a little billowing wind from your chest comes a pink rectangularness—and from you lips, those oblong, fragile billowing slits! This proves transformation is simply a matter of one's potential to speak of it, to lie there and not remain put. "See here," says the woodcutter to the maple, "don't you know I'm doing this for you, and what you could be? What I could be for being able to se the potential furniture and sports equipment under your bark and slug manured spores and fluttering mold caps which drop, discreetly, onto the hats and eyelashes of people, some of whom cannot even grow hair, let alone leaves?"
Now sallies forth he joyousness of being cruel. You look at the flowers through the camera as though they'll do something new and, watching intently, inevitably forget to look down, where a mongrel dog's heavy penis has attuned itself to your shoe, water-stick to lagoon. It releases sweet meaty vinegar onto you, and what do you do other than stand there? Resemble a sun burned mannequin stranded by Fifth Avenue in a patch of petunias.
Only in a park will an animal dump its ecstasy on you. O park, where squirrels and joggers collide and form paths, O park, where the axis harbor salami, varying scents of leatherette, and me, it ex-pedestrian. My most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruits of screaming, even normally, so imagine what the format of nature and man contained excessively together does to the roof of my head, the balloon of my delirium...it's, it's speaking. Ferment on, grow dashboards and cigarettes! Listen to pee! The secret of life is leaking: there is no such thing as integrity, everyone out of their pants immediately. Regret whiffs by, undetected. Protozoa have colonizes your toothbrush head, yet you continue to smile. Your teeth ache, are genitally weighted nerve heads of paste. Smoking hurts. Not smoking's worse. To feel or be felt. To touch or be the boob she's entombed in an angora of peach vastness. Like you, I believe in the idea of handling this firmly, but the act of placing my hand somewhere specific is so frightening it refuses. Since I am the one actually mesmerized, I command it. "Move me."
Saturated with mammalian prettiness, I may now lament all absences of viciousness when, really, I could have just as easily destroyed my birth certificate...
Leaf! I'm the skin (skull to feet) I'm encased in! Juices of oranges have stung to, then clinged, and then the world, world-like, let it in, sometimes easily, with fatal, eager sportsmanlike commitment, and sometimes uncomfortably, as when we keep our gas from leaving our rear-ends during dinner. Quick! Look up and see. What we normally refer to as clouds drifting past is actually the sky's puss coagulating and, even as we speak about white stuff and scabs, the perilous fecundity of preadolescence is turnipping beneath forbidden canopies. Too bad a canopy is not analogous to your skirt in this instance.
Meanwhile, "on the field," mythologies appear similarly; the long, long pitcher and the elephantine hitter who steps up to the plate, sniffs, hits one off the tip, then trots like a steer to a farmless trough. Final score: Unmiraculous, one; Superheroic, none. Cancer the crab (O to wrap our pincers around someone's toe bed and squeeze!) has disabled Hercules