Angelo 'NGE' Colella


I CONTEMPLATE MY HORIZONTAL SOUP


I contemplate my horizontal soup, its smell of chalkboard
drips all over the dress of the fatty stove. It is like
observing that midnight stone diamond which just hangs there
as coward as apples. A wingless panther munches home pages
and cleverly snaps titles, then reads them in a semiautomatic voice.
I remove another kiss from my healing sock and head to
the used swing set: Goethe is running headless in the yard,
I know it’s him because of the membership letter between his
decomposing teeth. Since he was a child, he has suffered from spirits
and that has turned him into a letterbox. How sad that this poet,
who in the Middle Age had been very famous on airplanes and trains,
now goes around humming recycled choirs on a friendzoned moped!



WRITING BURNS


Writing burns, and all writers are charred. Fingertips
smeared with the foam from words, like whispering ashtrays.
Poetry is cigarette culture, poetry rules are a demon corset
that shuffles organs. Poets have lips that pluck the back of a coin,
can’t you tell that writing is just more human waste?
One poet sees a swarm of houses and writes that they purr,
another one writes that they look sleep deprived. I don’t have
the credentials to say that a cat’s eyes are post-objects. I forget
a different language every day.



FLAT-FOOTED READERS


Flat-footed readers are more likely to see
their horoscopes come true, especially paper
horoscopes. The signs are scattered all over like
Italian relatives. Scrutiny backfires. I had read about
mine in my teatime bathrobe and monk boots, it warned
me not to sit through a river where the stones begin
because any glass could be my mother. Chopped it
into braille. Again I drink gallons of keystrokes to
tame with an illustrious inundation the
desperate fishes I am raising. Among
them, dolphins on a strike with
their legs crossed. It reminds
me that you, too, look so
young with you sit.



A BOWL-JUGGLER PAYCHECK


A bowl-juggler paycheck is just enough to
buy a hairdresser bench for large-enough people at an auction
and yet I enjoy my old sleep in my old blankets. 

When I eat, I like sewing-machine sauce on everything:
that, and my elephant sensitivity,
could be why I perspire the wrong way.

The day my best elbows got married
I was lab-bound tuning the Easter funeral banner
but I foresaw they would both wear embroidered doorsteps.

I was right: archeologists found a city in the neck of my shirt,
drowned in altar bread sawdust,
and so a flock of hikers had to hold close to their late-night shades.

European humans are like that,
they can be wobbly passengers like the Sun even if it’s prohibited
but they don’t accept velvet doves as a down payment.

That evening I read my walkie-talkie wounds,
like an Italian Christ fired from the circus,
and, just in case, I polished my backup run.

Angelo 'NGE' Colella was born in Italy and still lives there. He writes prose and poetry in Italian and English and also makes collages, asemic writing and DADA objects. Some of his works have appeared on Uut Poetry, Utsanga, The Ekphrastic Review, Il Cucchiaio nell'Orecchio, Il Mirino, La Morte per Acqua, 22 Pensieri.

 
 

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