Thursday, August 4, 2011

Why I Am Not a New Yorker Valentine

Because the Guggenheim
reminds me of the rotor
at the county fair the floor
drops off leaving you
pinned to the walls
like any dodgy work of art
made wholly irrelevant
by the concrete joke
of the building it’s in
currently housing when I
was there the “non-making”
of decoration mistaken for art
by someone famous
and because New York
is where everything goes
to happen last but with
the best possible score
and because of the dirt and
the noise and the people
everywhere you go
when for me three trees
is a crowd which is why I also
couldn’t enter Central Park
it felt like a museum
with its chocolate clouds
and finally because of the Frick
which is now a museum formerly
the house greed built and which
holds a treasure that never travels
and won’t be loaned out Rembrandt’s
magnificent ‘The Polish Rider’
how can I look on that face
and not remember the deaths
of the millions of peons who made it
possible for that asshole Frick
to buy this place in the first place
and all these wonderful paintings
even if Frank O’Hara humorously
tried to redeem it somewhat with
his reference to it in ‘To the Harbor
Master’ or was that just
our private joke?

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