It's Frank O'Hara's birthday!!! You remember O'Hara from last Friday's poem, "Having a Coke With You," which sounds like a pornographic activity as this month of isolation comes to a close. Anyhow, had he not been hit by a Jeep on Fire Island, he would have been 94 today.

Whenever I think of O'Hara's birthday, I think of the poet Roger Reeves, who wrote the poem "Someday I'll Love Roger Reeves" in response to O'Hara's poem, "Katy," which include the lines, "I am never quiet, I mean silent. / Some day I’ll love Frank O’Hara. / I think I’ll be alone for a little while." And after I get done thinking of those poems, I think of Ocean Vuong's "Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong," which he wrote in response to Reeves and O'Hara. And then I think, "With all of this intertextuality going on all the time, how could anyone really feel alone?" And then I remember that I don't like reading all the time. I like incidental meetings and having Cokes and not being alone so often. But then I remember a certain line from Vuong's poem, which you can find in his book, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, available at local bookstores.

Just a few quick things, because it's Friday, and because Ocean's poem is so good it doesn't need me speaking for it.

• Part of what makes Vuong's poem so powerful is his use of line breaks. He uses zinger structures for quiet profundities instead of for jokes, which risks getting real cliche real quick, but because he's so good it actually works. Look at the first few breaks: "The end of the road is so far ahead / it is already behind us." That could be bad, but the tension between the bummer set-up and the uplifting kicker makes it sing, especially after the tender surprise of an author telling himself not to be afraid, and especially when that author's name is Ocean. What could the Ocean ever be afraid of, much less a person named Ocean? The answer, of course, is the ocean's great curse: loneliness.

• But Vuong gives us the prescription for that later on in the poem in a line that might sustain us through the weekend, at least, like that brick sustains the poet's writing desk: "The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed. & remember, / loneliness is still time spent / with the world."

• One last quick thing: When I first heard Vuong read this poem in Miami back in 2014, he ended one of the lines differently. Instead of saying, "Don’t be afraid, the gunfire / is only the sound of people / trying to live a little longer," he had, "Don’t be afraid, the gunfire / is only the sound of people / trying to live a little longer, / and failing." Which do you like better?