On Frank O'Hara's Birthday

I was prepared to become you for so long and yet I've simply become me. Your words pound in my head, hollow drums beating low words streaming on about people I wish I could have made love to. Here in my universe, the one containing only fragments of the Frank O'Hara I was meant to become, I meet new people, but few artists and wonder still how to make you proud. I'm secretly lost, confused, wanting to find the path I started out on so confidently, but crawling helplessly on the floor. If living this life means staying myself, I'll accept it and move on, powered by your words and those of Joe Brainard, of James Schuyler and again of [especially] you. Alaska cannot make Frank O'Haras; life is too scattered, each person blowing in the wind towards an unknown destination. There is only change and nothing seems to settle. There is far too much money. I would have fantasized about you [more] if you were around today, but I will meet up with you again when we've both returned as lesbians or cats or both. To fall in love with a person who died thirteen years before I was born seems dimwitted, but my destiny is to discover my soulmate and know it is you. Become me instead, as I am not becoming you well. Sink into me through your words, which I spend countless hours devouring, Meld to me through osmosis, your loves of art and of men finding their way into my heart. Fragments are powerful when those fragments are of you.