Week Seven - Improv - O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died"

This is a pretty loose "Improv," but I read Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" and wanted to work with the chain of specifity within the peice:

The Day Lady Died
-Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   
in Ghana are doing these days
                                           I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

___

I thought to maybe use this draft along with the subject of the ridiculous GA road system--where everything has the same name, multiple names, and randomly stops being "Jimmy Campbell Parkway" to become "Jimmy Lee Smith Parkway" to become "Thorton Road." And finally, ending with the lovely tradition of giving directions using through landmarks that used to be there. As usual, I started writing and then...stopped. My peice being workshopped in class today is the same: I know it needs three more stanzas, I just don't know where to go with it.

Anyway, this seems rather prosey to me. And it's about six stanzas short of completion. But how do we feel about the current state of it? Too much? Too boring? Too pointless? Impossible to get to where I want to go with it?

It is 6:28 on a morning that began,
with overdrawn bank accounts and left-cracked car windows,
at 5:04: to farewell sounds of the carpool that stopped waiting.
At 6:26 I met Peachtree Street again, a long-running friendship of
6:02 CVS introductions, a 6:07 tip of the hat near the chained bagels,
6:12 greetings through the window of the Irish pub, and a 6:18 throttling
at Sage clothing supply. Our 6:26 meeting was more like a play date
that began with mismatched Legos jammed together:
I know where I am, do you know where you are?

It’s a bus stop kind of day, when the wind feels like the greasy shine
of newspaper on fingers and volcanic noses erupt and then decay at the tip. But
I am safe in my vehicle, a strip of ruled paper imprinting my hand.


...obviously not completed. Where to go from here?