Still Shining
From New York, Ben Nardolilli writes from his heart with a kind of soothing longing. It is well worth your time to swing and sway with the flow of his word!
He Has Wings and He Can Fly
Logged out for inactivity, I promise you all
Something better, a more active
Version of me that has yet to be born
Oh how it struggles, listen for it, I know I do,
A shadow of my being
Who will get into the system and dance
In ways I never thought were possible before,
Keeping all the trip wires
Busy with contemplation over the next move
The Theory of Forms
Come, prove to me now that anything persists,
All I see are stabs and brief flights
At immortality and then the inevitable decay
But I am willing to consider new evidence if
You can bring it to me to peruse,
I am no judge, but a jury of one, at your attention
Perhaps something survives, perhaps something
Is able to go on despite efforts
To stop it from ceasing its drive onward to an end
Tell me, I want to find out what struggles
And wins against the sunset,
Not for harvest, but for personal contemplation
Ticker Tape
Dear office park towers, shake your floors
like branches and make these steps
of mine part of a parade,
fling out your waste of papers and posters,
drop them all and make them something
more than just idle kindling,
toss out the furniture, the desks and beds
which sit so heavy on your concrete ribs,
especially now, at night,
now that you are empty of unhappy people too,
whose nervous steps make your floors itch
I call out to you,
dear walls and edges of this would-be chasm,
rise up, collapse, and give me a shower
The Reference Section
Life’s instructional manual, everyone seeks it,
Those quick answers, or at least
An easy index to dig up the answers
Buried under reams of ponderous paragraphs
I don’t want that book, it’s not fun,
And there’s no telling if it’s up to date,
An instruction manual to life
Needs to be a living creature in its own right
So, I search for a different manual to follow,
A guidebook to dreams,
How to have them, how to shape them,
How to leave them when it’s time to wake up.
Expectations on Columbia Pike
Greet us when you see us,
We try our best to be a landmark
She will have red pants,
And I will have just as red a scarf
I will have facial hair of some kind,
A hat of some import
She will have henna on her hands,
No hat, but a yellow headband
The lost French poet and his mother,
This is what you will encounter
The talk flowing from you to me,
The singing supplied by she
Artist:
Ben Nardolilli currently lives in New York City. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, Danse Macabre, The 22 Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, The Northampton Review, Local Train Magazine, The Minetta Review, and Yes Poetry. He blogs at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is trying to publish a novel.
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