For sake
Of beauty
I turn to the pen
To scrawl the music
And the word
And the rhythm’s verse
In gliding ink,
And trace
The shapes
Of worlds,
Following their forms
Like a child
Whose love
Is absolute
And brimming
With what perception
Endlessly births,
In riches unfolded
To the mind’s eye.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Now
With reluctant light
The wet earth
Breathes at last,
Breaks its dry fast
And puts
The eager tendril
Of must and spore rot,
Conveyed in shadow-damp,
To the dismantlement.
For what falls –
The withered leaf,
The stem, no longer turgid,
The petals browning,
– Mould will impregnate
And make an earthly scent
In season rich lament
And sad fermentation
Of soil and soul bound things
Untethered and unfettered
In their sinking sleep
And matters cool release
From forms previous.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
The mind
In the nib
Of the pen
Is the light
Switched on,
The wire
In electrical flood,
The synapse of seeing
Open eyed
And transposing
Ideas
Directly
In ink
As if
Their true form
Were black marks
Made upon the page
And not images
Wrapped in similes
And metaphors
Translating the link.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
This poem
Has no point
But
For the pleasure
In the curvature of words
And the feeling of forms
So malleable
In the mouth.
Just writing it
Is beautiful elocution enough.
Speaking it
Is satisfyingly pointless.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Autumn begins
In the leaves’ metamorphosis:
Flames’ tongue
Scorching the green retreat.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Somehow they are flowers too,
Plump and central
To their strands
And gossamer petals.
Bodies worked at
And made in secret
Through the summer months
Among loam and beneath leaf,
Until the garden
Grown golden and fruitful,
Leaves crinkled
With the sum of age,
Boasts beasts
Materialised to the cradle
Between stems:
Their worldly wears
And accumulation manifest,
Their nets
Set to the bountiful breeze,
Their fingertips poised
For the flower forms of insects
Borne on sunshine
And wingbeats.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
From wooden boxes
Her land
Unclasps
Still warm,
Knobbly tomatoes,
Imperfectly formed
But flush
With the colour of the sun.
Likewise, the just picked grapes,
Dusty with botrytis,
Contain the same
Sun-drunk quality.
And the wine
Decanted
With a funnel
In to re-used plastic containers
Is matter of fact,
Poured for its sweetness
And personality’s distillate,
Not for any labelled
Contradiction
Or propulsion
Of aggressive advert.
With a shrug of her shoulders
The woman says the only thing
She need ever say
To anyone:
‘I am, as I am.’
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Sun skinned
Boys
Delight
In the day’s final hour,
Frolicking on the jetty
And blue beside,
Wrestling each other,
Daring, jumping in and out,
Diving from the rocks,
Shouting language
From their boisterous mouths:
Dipping their matte skin
In Mediterranean
And coming out
Anointed in the gold
Of liquid
Painted by
By the sun’s
Last moment.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
In a tumbledown landscape
Above the sea,
Olive trees flutter silver green
In patches of thin earth
And scattered stone,
Scraped into a rough field.
Over the wall
A hobby of a vineyard,
Draws deep-root thirsty
For its plump infants
Suckling on the vine,
And the sun
Polishes them
To succulence
And sweet raisin wine.
And in the fallen down next,
Fennel grows rampant
And unkempt
Spicing with heady aniseed.
And in the shabby next
There is lavender on the wind
Emollient with herbaceous strands,
Mixing freely
With the airborne personality
Of wild thyme
And the pheromonal
Purple flowers of rosemary.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Her summer dream:
To fling open the shutters
And find a cobble stone morning
Already bustling
With early light
And amblers
Foraging for breakfast.
From her dwelling
In a stone cottage
Fronting the harbour
There is no better moment
Than when the sea air infiltrates
And she hangs loose
On the window ledge,
Smoking a long, cool cigarette
And sipping coffee
As her eyes quiz
The holiday makers lives
While her mind wanders lazily
In the light of a summer dress
And in the passage of time
That might steer aimless
Towards lunchtime
Or even a sun dosed nap
In the hot afternoon.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
For Mima
distilledvoice 