From Winamop.com

New poems by Ben Nardolilli


 

Excuses From the Love of Wisdom

 

Socrates confesses nothing,
Knows no shame,
He was just getting to know himself,
While Aristotle was trying to give matter
To the chest of a form he saw in the agora.
St. Augustine only asks not yet to be chaste,
In the garden by himself, mistaking
His fluster for the warmth of a halo,
While Tommy Aquino you believe,
He has not seen the end
Of his rosary beads in years,
And Marx you know doesn’t need it,
He’s got the wife and the maid.
Berkeley will only say it was in your mind,
Hume is silent, the image and the rubbing
Appeared, and so did the stain,
He knows nothing of cause and effect
But Kant prefers you call him a murderer.
Mill did it of his own free will,
The greatest good for him, no harm
To another, and Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir
Helped each other, it was mutual
To their satisfaction. Kierkegaard was pure of heart,
Weeping pearly tears for his fiancé,
And Nietzsche claimed to be screwing the void.

 

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Glazed with Rain

 

In the rain together
There is no rain,

At least no chance
Of ever getting wet

When the damp
Is not contained

But shared between
Two lovers

There is only
A curtain suspended,

A set of beads
Brushed aside

A change of colors,
For the ground,

For clothes and hair,
Never getting wet,

Mouths together
In the rain

Hold the humid away
With damp of their own.

 

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-day / Sat-

 

Writing notes down
On the cut up bits
Of an old calendar
That the library provides,
I think of my own days
Wasted and empty,
Never an appointment
Or rendezvous,
There were a few dates,
But mostly spontaneous,
These scraps remind
That there were always
Holidays, reasons
To go and celebrate
On behalf of Muslims
Or New Zealand,
Holidays I now claim
In retrospect as excuses
To christen useful
Those cheap bottles of wine.

 

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A Tune Beyond Us As We Are

 

Realize, that Bach
Could only be Bach, he was baroque,
Do not imagine him as anything else,
Able to play a keyboard
In any other time, or the harp
Before the board was found.

And Mozart’s operas are his own,
He had the key alone, and Beethoven,
Knew no other symphonies,
Schiller had the words, but not the tune,
And those you deride today,
Is there any other song left for them to play?

Each one has music to set their life by,
Most take from others, some produce,
And it is all unique, and yet
Still recognizable to the other, part
Of a grand arrangement for us all,
The Human Race is but its own opus

Gently allowed by the composer of time.


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