Open Letter in the Peerless Age

How pleasant to be the tastemaker
O’Hara, who wished to be a painter –
I aspire to Francis and Francis aspired
to paint, therefore I aspire to paint,
and write poems before a camera while
taking phone calls, using misspoken words
in my pieces like auto parts from the junk
yard of conversation.

Who are my contemporaries? The dog
tethered with pipe cleaners, perhaps,
or fat cats who can’t be bothered by doting
coo’s. I can’t possibly exist in a vacuum,
except air feels to have been breathed already.
Musky. Frank, what do you have against
punctuation? When you first arrived in the city
did you sit close to the subway doors? Were the
dashes and semicolons lifted from your coat
pocket like a pair of gloves while you kept tabs
on the poets in Ghana?

Your ghost kept me from running home, and
I’m afraid my father has made it so I can never
see Havana. Meddling is for the miserable, I agree
but Bacardi leaves me miserably hungover with long
strands of spit spilling from my lip. How do you
hold your liquor so well? Barcelona is the new Paris,
don’t you agree? Considering I’ve seen neither, but
the poets of the new millennium are desperately
searching for Bohemia, and I only want to be where
I am not a bother, where I am a jester with a silver
crank in my back. Where I can learn to butcher
whole sides of beef and fabricate notes on different
wines. This one has more earthy notes and this one
is far more coarse in texture, and this one would
pair well with a phone call from home.

You think I lack dignity, don’t you, O’Hara?
What I lack is shame and a sense of direction.
When walking through the city I follow my nose
and duck into the first lonely bar I find and wish
I were drinking from a wine bladder in a meadow
riddled with rabbits I’ll eat for dinner. I’d paint
the scenery if you were alive, pay for your shoe
shine, drive you to drink with my works.
There is no construction to be done in Bohemia,
and so no construction workers eating lunch because
there is no sidewalk.

J.P. Amador is a Cuban-American poet from Miami, Florida, living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Florida State University, where he received a Bachelor’s of Arts in creative writing, J.P. works in the service industry, feeding folks between writing poetry. His work has been previously published in 86 Logic Literary Zine and Grand Little Things Poetry Journal.