These first tender breaths
Of mildness
In daffodil sun
And light’s expansion outwards,
Are call to every dormant root
And bulb hunkering,
And call to birds
Delighted on the branch,
To shake off the long sleep
For thoughts of pretty plumage
And spirited strut and prance
And skyward dance
On tendril wisp
Of energy awakening.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Where is the boy lost
In the journey to the man?
Where is the balance point
In which he slips in metamorphosis
Through youth toward old age,
In transit of time’s
Morphing body become?
Perhaps he is not lost
But changed in skin
And greying hair
And stiffness in the bones,
The boy alive
But draped in memory’s
Encrustations
That sway the free thoughts
Of boyish dreams
From all their boyish freedoms.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The pure thought
In blossoms open
Upon the branch
Nothing but this
In blue sky and air
As fresh as newness birthed.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The incomprehensible bud
Unsheathed of winter,
Awaits
Unbelievable expansion
In to the living myth of spring.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Through the window of your pen
Come words flitting
On the breath of memory,
Their heart beat
Rich on wings of poetry
And love’s prospecting reach
In to the unknown.
I watch the corner of your world
From the corner of mine,
And find there, similarity
In the mind’s agile tool:
Your eye open
As mine too is seeing.
There remains now
Only the conveyance
Via electrons and emanating light,
As I touch individual finger prints
To the keypads of a screen
And hear your soft keying
Responding in kind tapping
From another far continent.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
If I could drink the sky’s cool mood
And mix
The light of first blossoms
So delicately sprinkled in
Then I would
Or breathe a draught of first warmed air,
White fragrance bathed
In sunshine’s friendly face
Arriving to the newness in me
Then I would
Imbibe them both
To feel this first fine sustenance.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
He smokes
Like he might find
The answer
Dragged through the filter tip,
As if his mood
Were hunger
And the inhalation
A type of food.
His smoulder
Is in his eyes,
His low hung head
And in dark shadows
Beneath his hood,
Where the ember burns,
Pulsing brighter
With each insistent pull.
He smokes
As if it were a cloak
Of defiance
And comfort mixed,
A dressing
For his sulking bruise,
An action instead of words
Passing the gateway of his lips.
He says it all
In silence
And half smoked butts
Finger flicked
And littering
The thresholds of doorways
And the brick walls he’s leant against.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The fear of movement
Steers the knife
And stills the flesh
In to a mask,
Free of wrinkles
And evidence
Of time past
And existence happening.
As if the demanding child
Were given
Its every shouted wish,
To go against
Life’s natural ageing path
And join
The Yes-Men horde
Branding the tampered
And augmented look
As the ‘must be’
– New beautiful –
For every old
Who holds too tight
To that which
Has long since departed.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
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