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| ben nardolilli |  | 1. 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. 2. A Dreadful Thing Against these tiles, unable To pierce or melt this surface, Naked, cold, and pink, I feel out of place, human, I cannot compete With it all, how clean, sharp, And hard these worlds are, The water is too soft And holds nothing, But the walls cannot bend, Only shatter, and I Am here shedding everything, Hair, oil, and pearls, Afraid of falling down Or standing up. Outside, during the walk It was different, The ground was like skin And I felt like a parasite, A flea with a straighter back, The leaves fell from branches And I could feel my terminal follicles Tingling and mourning for them, While I sat on branches That were sturdy at first But broke like bones in labor. And in this chamber Where I have gone To wash off all the remnants Of those travels, I stand like a worm in a box, The dangling uvula In the middle of a stone mouth. | |
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