The Likes
Stamped
On my offered work
Are certainly
Gratification,
But
When you, genius friend –
Whose work
Is masterly
And touches
The substance
Of the wide eyed bridge
Between mind
And beautification,
– Like my words,
I am enthralled
With the closeness
Of creation
And I wish
Our touching
Was a friendship
In the real
Matter of the world.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
When prisons
Are lights
And birth places
Of the newly born.
Sanctuaries
For those in need,
The digressed children
Of the world,
Patterned and learned,
Patterned and learned.
Where time spent
Is rich maturation
In the loam
Of love.
Where all who leave
Are first made whole
And go,
Full of heart
Full of blood,
Gifted all
That they would steal,
Gifted all
That was withheld,
Gifted all
That they would need.
Gifted.
They leave gifted.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Red throat invitation
To late harvest.
Autumnal fade
To sun stretched yellow.
Leaves freckled
And close
To golden
Old age
And the thin skinned
Invisibility
Before crisp release
And disappearance.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Like lights
Jeweling city sprawl
Below the sky borne plane,
Flowers
Are various
In their
Luminous display.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Nearly all
Are coaxed
To fall
And join
The swallowing ground
And its earthly convey.
Yet
Some things
Are still
Opening.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
My novel has become somewhat unruly. Until this morning, I hadn’t seen it for a couple of days. Then when I came down for breakfast, there it was, waiting for me, crouching at the bottom of the stairs. But oh my goodness, how it had grown. It was at least seventeen times bigger than I remember and its mouth parts were out of all measure and proportion.
I must say, it halted me in my sleepy decent. I was a little confused as to what to do. Was I to brush past as if it were normal size and without huge fangs and teeth in their multitude. Or was I to flee, scampering up the stairs to exit through the bathroom window. In the end, it made the decision. For as I pondered my choices, it pounced.
Luckily, my martial arts have taught me much. And so with the agility God has favoured me, I ducked and the beast flew straight over my head. I saw its underbelly as it went in a high arc and my worst fears were actualised. Its gut was plump with far too many words and bulged with a peculiar menace. I estimated that it must be a hundred weight, if not more. A terrible thought entered my mind at that point: I had conjured a monster. I was Frankenstein, and this thing, my work.
As it flew over, I took my chance, dashed below and slipped in to the kitchen where I found two things: a broom and poker from my wood burning stove. With these weapons I charged in to the fray. And all was violent ugliness. It bit and scraped and hit out with a rank verbiage and a mouth so full of words. Yet I parried, deflected, spun on the axis of a dance made of martial arts and hopefulness, and for a moment thought myself to be winning.
But then it unleashed its poetry. Oh God, how that hurt. A thousand lashes of its rhyming tongue. A thousand passages of its disappointments. Its woes fired like missiles to strike me down. All that awfulness rolled in to one grievous assault. Its power knocked me to the ground. I was paralysed. And then, it sat upon me with its full weight. It was a ton at least. A ton of words. A ton of sentences. The whole unedited mass crushing the breath from my lungs. Surely I was about to die.
But no. From beneath I saw its weakness. Its binding was not well strung. In fact, it was still in its crapy little ring folder. I took the knife, that I keep in my pyjamas, and stuck it in the gap. The clasps pinged open; so full was it stuffed. And in a instant the beast was done. It disintegrated before my eyes. Pages spewed and fluttered in the air. The chapters shuffled like a deck of cards. The whole thing punctured and deflating as if it were composed of hot air and nothing more.
But when I saw it dismembered and pitiful, I couldn’t strike the killing blow. Instead my heart went out to it. I gathered up its limbs and appendages. I nursed it as best I could, applying hot poultices and wiping away its tears. I collected the spare words (there were many) and hung the sentences out to dry (they were wet with sweat). When I left it on the sofa, watching shit TV, it looked as close to happy as ever I’ve seen. And when I popped a warm blanket across its first page, for comfort and warmth, I think it almost smiled at me.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Out of the mouth
Via the air
To the ears.
Imagination plays its part
In conception
Of ideas,
Of how
And why.
And like that
The view point
Expands,
Resembles a fact
Becomes a bit like a truth,
Ever Growing
In to something like
The real thing.
And then
Once cooked,
Once fiddled,
Once deceived
It spews out dogmatic
And unrestrained,
Exits
As it is born,
The truth formed,
The truth made,
The fact ejected
Out of the mouth….
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
I mean really, what are they thinking? Their garden is tiny. I’m all for animal rights and rehoming strays, but a rhinoceros in suburban Oxford; that’s just not on!
Sometimes I think I’m going mad. I say this because no one else on my street seems to pay the slightest attention to the giant beast in their vicinity. When the sun shines, my neighbours mill about on the road exchanging pleasantries, jars of plum jam, gossip etc, just as they always have. But no one ever mentions the rhinoceros. I’ve brought it up a few times but they just stare at me blankly as though I’ve spoken another language or were speaking out of turn. It makes me feel very uncomfortable so I’ve given up asking. There remains, of course, something unspoken in the air!
Bob and Joan, in whose garden the beast dwells, say hello to me every morning over the garden fence. And every morning there it is, right behind them. I wonder, do they not see my wild eyes flickering with confusion as the beast sways on its giant legs and snorts as it munches breakfast? How can they ignore its heavy breathing and occasional flatulence, passing off the whiff as just an unlucky farmyard breeze? And what about the truck loads of fodder arriving each day?
I mean, it would be fine if the rhinoceros had something to say: a point of view or a joke, even. God knows, I’ve tried to strike up conversation countless times. But it behaves as if it were from the jungle or the plain. Mostly it completely ignores my presence, even when I’ve been so kind as to offer it a mid morning coffee or an early evening beer (quite rude really). However, this morning there was something worse than being ignored.
I popped out to put the washing on the line and saw the rhinoceros rubbing its flank against my neighbours garage. I called out a hello and its ears twitched. I thought it might grace me with a chat. However, it did not. Instead it positioned its rump in my direction, lifted its tail, muttered something under its breath and then farted the fart of a two ton ruminator, which if you’ve not had the pleasure, is like the worst, moist hairdryer with a bowl of yesterdays sodden muesli thrown in to the mix. I would say that I was aghast but actually I was thickly coated. I felt like a fish-finger dipped in chocolate and showered in nuts. Only my two frightened eyes blinked naked of the foul and outrageous ejector. And so peppered, I felt an urge for sweet cleanliness that only a man thus dipped can know. I slid and dripped my sorry way to the bathroom, a shameful trail upon the kitchen floor.
Later on, when I’d cleaned up (in body if not in mind), I retaliated with a volley of insults thrown over the fence. But the beast is thick skinned indeed and swished me away, dismissing me with its tail.
I’m going to call the council. I really am. I mean, I’ve heard and used the elephant in the room metaphor many times, but a rhinoceros in the back garden is quite another thing.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Dr Paradox lives at number 13. I don’t know what he does all day but it appears he doesn’t work. I have coffee with him every Tuesday at eleven, sharp. He is a stickler for timeliness but remarkably relaxed when I’m late.
It’s hard to tell his age: somewhere between 1 and 89. That sounds ridiculous, I know. But you’ve not seen him. He sometimes wears a white moustache and sometimes a bib. He has one enormous bushy eyebrow while the other is trimmed. His skin looks soft as a babies and wrinkled with age. Often he wears a white robe in his house though when I’ve seen him in town he wears jeans and t-shirt. I think the robe may be for my benefit. Everyone else on the street just knows him as John, but he insists I refer to him as Dr Paradox.
I usually go over accompanied by my cat. He invites me in and we sit in his lounge. He’s had an enormous bath fitted in one corner and sometimes we sit in that – but bizarrely without any water and fully clothed. He often remarks on the beautiful buoyancy of air: how warm it is, how clean it makes you feel etc. He says that he only fully appreciates it when understood through the context of an empty bath. Generally, that cats don’t join us in the bath. I forgot to mention, he has a cat too. It’s named Inverse and he’s a ginger tom. I’m not sure if our cats get on or not. They seem to spend an awful lot of time attempting to out-squint each other or they play the strange mind game that cats enjoy, where they try to make each other invisible. And it appears that sometimes it works.
Generally on my arrival, Dr Paradox will ask if I’d like a coffee. To which my answer is invariably: yes. His stock response is: yes, but do you? My answer is: yes, I’d like a coffee. He then answers: yes, but do you really want a coffee? This interplay usually results (eventually) in a coffee, though not always. To be honest, I’ve not got the slightest clue what he’s up to and while it’s unfailingly annoying, some part of me enjoys it very much. Sometimes, even though I’ve asked for coffee he brings me tea instead, which I drink without complaint lest I have to go through the whole process again.
The weird thing is: I always feel refreshed after my visits. The coffee (when I get one) is great but somehow there is more to it than that. It’s as if the air really is buoyant and cleansing and contains a warmth, just as he says it does.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
What blindness is this
That sees
The mind
Creative
On the page
Even where the ink
Is absent and forgetting?
For surely
I see the words
Formed perfect
On the paper
With these eyes
Of mine.
Yet others
Find
In the form,
Omissions
And lack
Where my mind
Has conjured
And bridged
And leapt
Across the cracks.
And if
In my blindness
I still see
Words fully formed
And correctly ended,
Then what
In the real world,
Beyond the pen,
Have I also
Made perfect?
What gaps
In reality
Have I
Fabricated?
What have my eyes
Seen
In the jurisdiction
Of belief,
Unreal to all but me
Who paints
Stencils and stained glass
On lenses
Through which
I look
In order
I might see
The things
I wish
Rather than
What is actually present.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
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