Now when I walk around at lunchtime <br />I have only two charms in my pocket <br />an old Roman coin Mike Kanemitsu gave me <br />and a bolt-head that broke off a packing case <br />when I was in Madrid the others never <br />brought me too much luck though they did <br />help keep me in New York against coercion <br />but now I'm happy for a time and interested <br /> <br />I walk through the luminous humidity <br />passing the House of Seagram with its wet <br />and its loungers and the construction to <br />the left that closed the sidewalk if <br />I ever get to be a construction worker <br />I'd like to have a silver hat please <br />and get to Moriarty's where I wait for <br />LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and <br />shaker the last five years my batting average <br />is .016 that's that, and LeRoi comes in <br />and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 <br />times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop <br />a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible <br />disease but we don't give her one we <br />don't like terrible diseases, then <br />we go eat some fish and some ale it's <br />cool but crowded we don't like Lionel Trilling <br />we decide, we like Don Allen we don't like <br />Henry James so much we like Herman Melville <br />we don't want to be in the poets' walk in <br />San Francisco even we just want to be rich <br />and walk on girders in our silver hats <br />I wonder if one person out of the 8,000,000 is <br />thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi <br />and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go <br />back to work happy at the thought possibly so<br /><br />Frank O'Hara<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/personal-poem/
