Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!

And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

But it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.