Dizzy Gillespie for President

***

back from paris...
and at 8.30 this morning, on my way to coffee, a nypd police i passed w the girl i love said outta that mythical blue 'i'm on a 14 hour shift. i arrested a girl at 4 am and the fucking assistant da's wont be around 'til 3 this afternoon so i gotta keep myself busy. i mean, i get paid overtime, but i'd rather be home with my wife and my daughter. but y'know, as my dad told me, you went to that coffee shop, it's expensive, but i go there sometimes [on 20th street b/w 7 and 8], a $2 cup of coffee will never catch on. this country's gotta set it's priorities straight. as long as a gallon of coffee [subsidized] costs more than a gallon of gas [subsidized] we'll never get it straight.'
true, that...



by Arman

"The Day Lady Died"
frank o'hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes
it is 1959, and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in East Hampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega, and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatere and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.

***

"one red cento"
from 'all roads... but this one'

it was the brilliance of snow atop the rubble
under the gaze of orbiting strangers
sinking down deep in the forest by the fire
that need and desire demanded.

winter rolled through and conquered the land.
crows and starlings danced to a boil,
flipping and turning, blushing and burning,
and swallows drifted south and whispered darling.

all our summers gone and scattered...
a hillock's-worth of pantagruelian stone
burned heart-holes in the coloring book of love
in a temple in an office in a grove in arcady.

this was before the ramones: rocks were silent.
now the phone rings, purrs rather, a trim line.
a shorthair prances, a fledgling in its teeth.
the moment fills their heads and porkpie hats.

"Robert's kid brother, Frank, played the drums. The bassist, Paul, drove into town in a beautiful old car -- a Galaxie 500. That was the first I had heard of that particular automobile . . . It began to dawn on me that these guys weren't really hipsters at all. Is it hip to be obsessed with Kerouac and wear a porkpie hat? . . . On Friday nights the boys liked to go dancing at Nirvana, a bridge-and-tunnel club high above Times Square. They took me along one time, but I didn't understand the attraction of this club. Why would you move all the way to New York City to hang out at a place like this?" -- D. Wareham Stuyvesant Town and the Age of Reason

Read Black Postcards and listen to Lalo Schrifin's soundtrack to The President's Analyst (you might want to watch it too...)