The Angels and What They Teach Us

“Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped lie.” - Tangerine

When I was a lad I wanted more than anything
to be American. Didn't have
the happiest of childhoods, and so I looked
to movies for escape, the junk
of cinema and its marketing clouded
my adolescent mind.

The "trailer voice" emerged. I saw myself
tightrope walking along the road's curbed edge:
the unsubtle, manipulative, pseudo-classical music
backing the empty symbol of my childish movement:
"he was just a boy... until he found himself again."
(A tinkling chord. MR SMITH fades in, in copperlate.)

The iambic pentameter restrained
for use by Yankee market men.
Los Angeles was always just a vacuous half-truth,
and even "half" is generous. It always lies to its Old World.
And I'd be played by Robin Williams, perhaps. Or some adorable child
who'd later kill himself with drugs in some Los Angeles flophouse.