6758. POP-UP BOYS (the long version)

POP-UP BOYS 

(the long version)

I shall have vision tomorrow : I shall be able

to see things, an undistorted lens looking out, 

into, instead of away from, time. And so it shall 

be too that the pop-up boys will be around again.

I see them often  - engaging and witty, lavish

homosexuals, crafty or dim-witted together. No,

I take that back : I've never actually seen a

dim-witted one at all. All and always sharp

as hell, as a knife, as the point they wheedle 

me with. I can take it. I can take it.

I am tough.

-

Now it is already tomorrow, and they still do 

not evince the facts  -  I'd want their mothers 

and daughters first, if that makes any sense. 

I'd rather just walk away, into that taxman's 

woods which comprises the rest of this fitful 

society. At midnight  -  or anyway at its stroke  -   

then even I see Hamlet's ghost. Which is 

really not Hamlet at all.

-

I have to wonder: if I laughed would they still deliver

the mail? On this desktop at the edge of 53rd Street,

there is nothing now but old calling cards and dead

art magazines. They are throwing those sorts of things

out wholesale these days : the printed paper world matters

little anymore. Another Frank O'Hara, were he to stumble

here today, would find himself amiss. The bell would toll

for nothing. The smoke and the mist of just another ghost

would be found, in the end, to be only he himself again.

-

Those still engaged in the legion of the concerned are talking

swiftly of other items  - the Fire Island jitney, how crowded 

it was, the meat they grilled at Stearn's, what was it exactly, 

bison? Did you see the lovely gams on that lonely gal singing?

And then, and then, me again. I want to go away, alone.

The pop-up boys, today they have guns and bellies.