DANIEL D'ANGELO
The highs and lows
Why, it feels good to be completely
exhausted, to be rinsed, yeah ruined!
Mm, a lot of deuteragonists and lieutenants sit
on the cliff’s edge eating tangerines, “A lot of us,
we’re tethered to sunken airplanes and boat wrecks
at the bottom of a textbook bay.”
Well, my head blew up. “An accretion of tangerines
is a climax, a sunset, a loss thing—glory, as anyone
knows it.” Really REALLY good swordfighter later
in life. Influence is weather that might be
permanent, like any love. History is everything
but is not complete. Here, though, it is!
So you absorb the red disc of the sun, small
knife in your art-throat, and you live fine!
Lumber
I expected you to come from the North,
the path winds down! Oh it goes between
conifers and a Home Depot, oh and I passed
really definitively good commercial art
that convincingly, like poison ivy, conveys
a clear and direct message: Impulse and beauty
are itchy, and 50 years later, breathtaking. Holy!
Anywho and but so, you came down from the North,
like a one-time sunset. Usually, the best thing ever
is distracting. Mm, some water laps over your cheek.
On another day, you run several miles in the cold.
Oh that is a good watch, and those are familiar
rocks. I recorded myself and it appears,
hearing the tape, I can barely speak! I had no idea!
Plus
1
They did an oil change with 100% synthetic
oil! The robotics in the car wash, which is free,
are powered by God’s left hand, which is free.
It is not a good car wash, and it doth not dry
off the car. A huge flame-and-white cat
opened the dumbest bible, prayed, entered
the street, and tipped over a garbage truck,
crushing the shoulder of a garbage man!
It was devastating! Synthetic cops got high
gassing up the old-school-cool cruiser!
You know, they did not deal with the flame-
and-white cat, but they were (they are!)
extremely good cops!
2
This poem is not set in Berlin—
but it is now. The cops in Berlin are
hot as hell, and they make crime blush.
They say or they write:
I love you and it makes me
so much less than myself
I disappear. Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnof
art museum is the best in the world.
Your eyes deceive—often for the better.
You cannot make mistakes; you have
no extraneous time—the Mexican
artists’ videos subtracted you.
Live and visit Berlin
Hey, the tape! The recording is healing. Hooph.
Way after the fact, I found out I was in love.
The usual day is long and confusing.
Blond and royal and rage, gray lake swimming
a few thousand meters, bits of gold in the water,
bits of blue sleep swimming, a few pages of red
memory. Oh, as it turns out, everything fore-
shadows everything. And emptiness is not even
empty, like how nothing is full. The day is long
and confusing and goofy to the touch. And I ride
the train home. Hooph. And the dead come back
to life all the time, and the day is long and confusing.
People are told a really precious thing
Have you duped anyone, or duplicated them?
Nevermind and well, you look at objects and people
from a megadistance and they become like a church
or a still parade and become something orange
or yellow to you. They take on ice. You invent
meaning! And you can be lazy and it can be a real drag
on the champagne sort of cooked into your hair.
You had a really bitchin’ night—mm’ you tuned in
to a crisp, refreshing webinar. The presenter
was just a total power-scholar on Henry James—
talk of HJ sidetracked the webinar.
It never got on track, it was supposed to take place
on a bright, careful battlefield, and in a hospital,
and 25 years ago. The speaker was qualified,
was thrown from a horse, had flown internationally
into a tree, oh, she wore a sporty toque;
anywho, we never had winter again. Ew, eventually
you went fishing and cooked and ate a bloody god!
Daniel D'Angelo's poetry has appeared in The Collagist, H-ngm-n, Alice Blue, B O D Y, and elsewhere. He's from eastern Iowa, received degrees from the University of Iowa and George Mason University, and lives in Washington, D.C. You can reach him at da.dangelo19@gmail.com.