and so he takes an orange and sticks
a lot of cloves in it and then he looks at it and realizes
that he’s killed the orange.....
Orange is lying bleeding in my hand!
—Frank O’Hara
He’d had a bunch of vivid dreams. When he rose
from his disheveled bed, he quickly had a pen in
his hand and a typewriter in the other. And with
those he reproduced his sweet, cherubic dreams
of pythons and fruit, which he laid out poetically,
in as accurate detail as he could muster, the
fantastical memories fading as he scribbled,
vanishing as he typed. But what dreams they
were, filled with the sun and with snakes and
with fruit more orange than he’d ever tasted.
Oh, harbinger of great taste and designer of
endlessly repeatable lyrics, may such dreams
come true, and with zing, which is even better
than aplomb, and may the journey be sweeter
and tangier, too. May the dreams reveal them
selves to us all, oh prophesier, to be brighter
than the past and (we pray so hard) may we
move with a swiftness into this ideal future.
And may it happen quick, before we are
torn from the margins.
