“I’m in-love with being in-love”

I’m sorta – I guess you could say, “lost” — if you would

Like, being wide awake, eyes open but you see nothing

Resembling where I used to be, like how

That time we thought to ourselves the world was our

Little, private hideaway

All onto ourselves, because who you are makes me

Difficult…where did those seconds in bed amount to?

I’m sure you’ll always end up somewhere, there

As an angel of anatomy

And, already forgetting

If—I can’t say I’m sorry enough, I’m sorry, my love

That I’m not as special as you want, but difficult

To get a grasp of, these ideas of things

You got are already falling off like teeth

Underneath my pillow

Like, I do get it (sometimes), you were—are a lot

Like me, like, you used to like me, like, like-me-like-me

You aren’t a ghost, but I see you now, right…there

That’s the way we people go, always just remembering the morning

When we resembled something

I’m not angry, I’m not even sad one, singular, granular bit

If it could, should make you happy—then I am

Praying for that, if it would only happen

Sooner than never, I’d be happy

Knowing you’re free

Everybody’s now saying, talking things, invisible things, things you say when you don’t mean

How you really mean them to mean, the way I say “I’m dying,” when I’m only laughing

How they say literally when it doesn’t mean a thing, how I think of it because we were young

Then as we are now, two rocket ships into dust

And barely made out

Oh, that’s why, honeycakes, it’s all so silly, superstitious, bang-bang-witty-witty

To understand why none of it has to make sense,

When you’re in the middle of all them

Transparent; a soul’s breath I am

Not who I say I am

At San Gennaro Festival of Lights, Little Italy circa 2000-something – I

Saw a version of us living along…what we wanted all along

That’s tempermental, futile and ironic, considering the past isn’t

Bad but a little escape, hideaway behind clouds for planes

A little place…where I’m still, (somehow) important

Like a dream, about being kissed at the mall turned to college

By someone who I only know in that world, seeking this

Infinite little bleeding lip, suction the bottom skin beneath the upside

Saying, “I better be somebody, aren’t I?” I better, I must

Outrun, those little numbers written somewhere around

But I made love—you made love over me, we did it as acquaintances before

We used to as friends, how that empty window overlooking Bushwick houses

Felt like a portal to everywhere and nowhere in our 20’s

Where, how, is it I am able to just sit and stare at you

Asking me what I’m thinking about

As I’m running the running, running myself—being someone I imagine myself

Lives before that first breath of consciousness of last night’s manger

Always, always asking someone if they’ve seen that person you’re looking for

If it meant something at all, would you

Wake me up?

If it’s not the insecurity before, no then it became anxiety, then undersleeping

Or eating, working, then the monotony of balance opened up the question

That nobody likes asking, that question when your day asks your subconscious

“Did you find that, that, yet?” And you kinda can’t help but push it away

Because days don’t have consciousness, only brains

Brains of inorganic materiality that breathe impulses of shadow and silk

That take notes of all the little, unimportant details, like someone’s fingernail

Polish back when you rode the train with them to school, or how Jesse’s mustache

Was whitened even though she dyed her hair black, how beautiful you smiled

Next to me at that bakery in Astoria, Queens

The way I was next to you, it was just, such, oh but a little-itty-bitty moment

In-time that’s…well, it could be, still there, us…we are, by the way I smell the air

In my head, the train going clack-clack-clack as it goes by overhead, you have coffee

To-go on your lap, I’m excited to be with you

Even now

And survive the ocean shroud, the abyssal swallow, tide of waves come black space

Ocean deepens we can’t see and yet, doesn’t this…right here, now, feel (somehow)

Important? Even for a second, a minute, a kiss we had at the top of that Brownstone

To the Fleet Foxes and someone watching us, but I’m not over it

In the way people do when they forget

I’m not over those, those infinites – nights together walking suburban glom and shadows

How I guessed I found a home in your – all of your’s aura(s)

It still means, it still defines, it is still a shrine

In my mind, heart, skin, bones, scent, eyelashes, motions, hands, underneath my blankets

And, I’m thinking maybe I’m supposed to care, or else, why am I here?

I’m not, but I am, still here. I’m still there.

Don’t you, won’t you, should you, have to, are you, please could you

Be there too, walking the summer near Murray Hill, Curry in a Hurry, Saturday afternoon

It can’t hurt, because hurt is only a word, and the feeling is more like a phantom

A small prayer, when you feel so small, so in-love with who knows what

In-love with the sound of an inner rush, your inner crush, girl-mindset, youthful fires

Out by the staple of tires and beachwood shorefront, by the inner beach you see if

You can want to when you’re pushing off, when we were --- in love

How you set me down to silhouttes of lower Manhattan and I’m in love

With sitting with you, smoking cigarettes in East Mesa, and you gave me a picture of you

Red hair as the morning cracks of autumn, slivers of sanguine and you said to come over

But it’s real late, are we still friends, Lindsay we feel like we were soulmates

For the briefest of 5 minutes in our late teens, listening to Disintegration, lake-visiting

Just happened, I swear it did, don’t you feel like it did?

To me, it still is.

That’s just the poetry of rust, of growing to dust, fireflies dwindling down

When the music is all gone, after we’ve taken pictures of us, Magdalene and Christine

With that Pentax meduim-format, those negatives prove we once were

Immortal, we were demig-ds in a parking lot in the mid-2000’s, once, a trio of us, in-love

I wish you knew, that a part of my soul lives there now

Across the gleam of your eyes, smile into the same sun out now, but the ground has changed

The ground has changed, the people in it and their relationships—transient as fireworks

On the 4th of July weekend, watching off the Westside Highway with a crowd of strangers

Didn’t you see how…everything, it was?

I was in-love.

I was in-love, as I am in-love, with nothing but being in-love

In-love with a piano prerecorded in 2011 from Brooklyn, playing in a small office in the desert

In-love with this image I have of you from the year 2000 in Times Square

In-love with us in Chicago, you buying me a camera and we’re still in-love not too long back;

In-love with that kiss when you asked at the Grand Canyon, I’m in-love with us there

Because being in-love is a lot like being under anesthesia

When you breathe in, all the good emotions come flowing into your brain, reality out

The dream stays for as long as the drug’s in your veins

And when it’s all over, said and done, you suddenly come to, wake up

One second later, but the time is gone

Because being in-love is a lot like being behind bars,

You see, you’re imprisoned for an indetermined amount of time, based upon other people

And what they say you’re capable of (or not), then you wait, wait for the bars to come undone

Clicking open, stuck with a bunch of other prisoners against their will and then

A helplessness defines your heart

Because being in-love is a lot like remembering things

Because when those things pass, you still feel like it just happened

Because even though it’s past already, you can’t help but think maybe, it’s still happening

You think: “No, this can’t be right,” because if it is, then it means that everything’s transient

It means that, the things you don’t want to remember for some reason, burn into your memory

It means that being in-love is a lot like giving up, not your freedom or thoughts

Not your independence, or spirit, nor necessarily your finances or house

What it means, is you give up a part of yourself to be stuck in some place forever

Like graffiti through a temporal voidness that eliminates the consequences of time-space

So, no longer are you moving forward in time, but back and forth, constantly

It means you are this girl, this, insignificant, yet, peculiar somebody, with a heart, a head

Full of many things to express, say, yet, only a tiny percentage of the population will ever really

Get it, because we’re all misunderstanding each other all the friggin time, and so

Communication becomes not just an art, but delicate matrimony of chance and circumstance

A game you try, becaue you want someone to remember you had thoughts

That you gave a fuck, that you tried with all your might to make your marriage work and yet

It not only didn’t, but came crumbling down faster than a house of cards gets blow over,

And you question whether it was even really love in the first place, or just whatever

You question how sincere you are, if you can really keep your promises, or if anything

Truly means anything at all

You start to wonder who’s genuinely nice to you, and the ones trying something else

If you’re really likeable, or just somebody who’s really not

You say, maybe it’s all for the best, but then, in those few, precious moments before the New

Year comes, your heart has its own fear of the dark,

For loneliness is only a word, lonesome maybe a sentence, but that feeling behind those words

You swallow into your gut, right before the new year turns

When last year, we broke it watching Almost Famous by ourselves, which it ended

Right on the New Year, and now being in-love

Means something else, being in-love means maybe you don’t know anything

Except that time keeps moving on

You realize, being in-love with someone besides yourself is this thing that has so many do’s

And don’t’s, so many rules, like a meta, and you sit and wonder how did you get here?

What kind of person are you, to be where you’re now and feel so

In-love, but you’re alone

With music, and the images, and the smells, and the feelings of the past places, and people

Of that coffee shop in the East Village, going to White Sands with Linda, how you wept

When you first saw Pan’s Labyrinth at Jessica’s in Park Slope

How you just felt like it would all last forever, somehow, foolish as that is

Like, how can not everyone feel in-love, all of the time?

How, just-I mean, like how, can someone not want to call you their first choice?

Like, how you screwed up real bad your first couple chances, and now it all feels like

Makeup, cause you never put it on, because you’re divorced now, as a young woman

So it means something, right? Like, shouldn’t this happen to everybody?

Like, just because you’re getting un-married, doesn’t mean you’re a bad person?

Because, you’re still in-love with being in-love, and you still want to be, in-love

Because being in-love is not a drug, it’s not one thing or even many, necessarily

It’s a state of being, because being in-love, before the New Year drops, and you are

Still in-love, with you with how I remembered you, seeing your hair in the wind

How you laughed with me and now it means…I don’t know, but it isn’t here

So, being in-love is this thing that feels like it’s all I got, because it makes me feel special

When I’m thinking, why is this anything peculiar, even special

Because I like being in-love, so what’s so wrong with love?

What’s so wrong, Julianna, can’t I be…with someone?

So, in this new year, my resolution will be, to be

Continue to be, in-love

It doesn’t have to be with someone, it doesn’t have to be with you

But, I will keep on being in-love, because I love being in-love

I love our small moments that have defined me, all of my past, you who’ve passed

I’m in-love with our us, I’m still here, I’m still there

And I don’t have to be, anywhere (else)

© 2022, A. M. D’Angelo