Magma Poetry

I’m in the big Waterstone’s on Piccadilly looking at the Selected Frank O’Hara and I’m not really sure I like him that poem about Billy Holliday so narcissistic self-serving prissy everything I’d hate to be and possibly am but then I spot a poem called You’re Gorgeous and I’m Coming and it really makes me smile what a great title for a poem and Frank O’Hara I think it’s true I have to admit it I like his nose in photographs God the world seems so frivolous sometimes when there’s shit going off everywhere what’s the point in poetry to the poor bastards in the bombs last week and I can’t stop thinking about that wedding party in Afghanistan that got splattered by the US a couple of years back nearly all of them dead and all I remember is one mundane photo of a little boy lying injured in a bundle of clothes staring his big sad eyes right into the camera and then another photo I was looking at the other day Bernadette Devlin in the Bogside years ago smashing flagstones to throw at the RUC and it rang a bell with me when I was a kid in Dublin an unafraid young woman was something special to see and I remember when the IRA campaign was going on in England how people seemed embarrassed by the subject probably because I was Irish and they just didn’t know what to say which is fair enough but it didn’t seem helpful everybody tongue-tied and I am as guilty as the next person if not more so anyway I liked the title of the poem so much I ended up buying the book which was 10 quid I couldn’t afford so I walked home up Regent’s Street through Regent’s Park into Camden Town and I got a text from Marc saying he’d put the hundred quid he was lending me into my account and honestly London looked terrific you know how it manages to look quite majestic sometimes a big moon overhanging everything kind of poignant with all the buildings and streets full of people doing their stuff and I thought about Frank O’Hara RIP I thought thanks for writing a poem called You’re Gorgeous and I’m Coming the world and you are excellent for making me smile like that I want more of it I let myself wander off too easily I need to remember how important people are and act on it and I thought of the person I’d heard about who survived the bombs on the underground and when they made it onto the street they ran up to somebody who was just passing by and hugged them somebody just getting on with their morning somebody they didn’t know from Adam.