poetry by Ben Nardolilli

    

Penny Sundown

Repetition and rhyme
Trapped by the canal,
In the mournful solitude,
Drunkenness already diminishing,
Or gone, outer face of the night
Turning yellow, everything
That is speaking is flying,
The dead explore the clothed.

Heaven wheels itself
Through the crowd,
As a moving skyline of smiles
Speaks with bat wing mouths,
Everything experiments in color
But you remain dark and clear,
The walking cave, the canvas.

Several pages long,
The green grass subjects
Surround the emaciated lagoons
While it lacks poetry,
Somewhere in the celestial grime,
Flesh of lives sings
With voices muffled by plywood.

In the rosy punctured dawn,
You wake again, drunkenness,
Trapped in by the canal,
The river is on fire,
With clay steps you follow
Porcelain feet, until
Sacred blue washes you away,
Your ear swirls, your eye pants,And you’ve gotten straw for free.



A Book Review

It was a very subtle book, yes
Very subtle and filled
With the intrigue of eyes
And the language of flowers,
So subtle, that even now
I cannot remember the title.




A Voice Left

They consider
your ashen hair crudeness
a silence,
you hover written in the book

You write it and walk
from Germany
but your drink is in unrest
against time

Had it been a vice-versa
color not ripped up by lead,
would you follow
with orchids singing?

Now you are a grounds to argue
over as the smoke hits
to engage in a mark:
poetry, technology, and truth




A Permanent

All we know leaves
The tomb,
Even laying out the body true
Forces a relevant turn
To either side

It points out
To a temporary burial,
A borrowed Sabbath
Behind the slippers
Hung in red and in sight.



Transient Global Amnesia

In a post-bicentennial world,
Labor force participation is now altered,
Only the inevitable is ever different,
Revolution is a world taken,
Change is nothing you can change.

Children with high confidence
In electricity abound, everyone taught
To jump over candlesticks,
They overlap with gas savoring adults,
Forming ill paid oily societies.

The simple job is the first and the last
Only the middle is complicated,
Refinement and retirement is given over
To scrolling answers and lives
Saved through codes and  normalcy.

Too many years, too many decades
Too late, forever too late,
Nothing different out of the college coma,
Everything threatened is everything
We know of this life and cherish

I am a twenty five year old writer currently living in Arlington,
Virginia. My work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, One Ghana
One Voice, Caper Literary Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, Super
Arrow, Grey Sparrow Journal, Pear Noir, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and
Yes Poetry. Recently, a chapbook of mine Common Symptoms of an
Enduring Chill Explained, has been published by Folded Word Press. I
maintain a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and am looking to publish
my first novel.