Poems
Fronds of coraline and sweet,
Tender wands disseminating
Flume flower and myth
And decadence:
The flush festooned,
Plush push
Of sap transformed
To nectar’s heady
Significance of sex
And desirous fertility
Expressed in petal perfect
Symmetry and wantonness.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Explorer ponders
The journey ahead:
Someone must take the first step.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
In to the phone’s world
I look,
So varied
So shiny
So new.
In to this
I download my memory,
My images,
My thoughts.
And all the questions
I might ask myself,
Both profound
And mundane,
Away I merrily Google.
The world
In one way widened,
And yet
One way closed
As life shifts
Ever nearer,
Ever closer
To the outside mind
Of the irresistible cloud.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
The sum
Of all that you are:
Your loves,
Your hurts,
Your truths, beliefs, perceptions,
All that you have learned.
Your dreams,
Your feelings,
Your heart,
And all the spanned divides.
Remember
There is no argument:
Another’s point of view
Is an equation
Unknowable as a distant star,
With strands of reason and belief
Meshed and matted
As the synapse brain
Is thus complexly wired.
There is no argument
For personal right
Is derived from what arrives
To the matter of the mind,
And in that
We are all paradoxically different
Yet siblings side by side.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Cobbled till they’re smooth
And edgeless,
Stones like our selves
Come rightfully
And finally
To spherical ease.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
The scientist say they know it.
The religious say they own it.
Societies loosely adhere to common
Agreements of mostly hearsay,
And we all bumble along
As if we lived in the same world!
But the truth,
(If I dare be so bold,
Or at least, my personal
Understanding of it), is that
There are worlds in multitude,
Understandings in multitude,
Perception in multitude,
And to claim one truth
Above and beyond,
Is of the finest, beautiful egotism,
For no man knows the whole sum
And lives as he drifts with glimpses of
Moments, brief meetings and
Encounters, dances with partners
Ever changing:
All deeply relevant,
Deeply relevant to him.
Truth is heart close.
Mind close.
Soul close.
And individual in its unraveling.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
When this happened
He felt a smug, warm feeling
And an unbearable rightness,
The kind of light
That no one really wants to like
For its whiff of the sanctimonious.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
It’s just the same as it always was
Except now
I can read your every unedited thought
And see
Your self image
So much more clearly.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Worse than hatred;
The blanking hand
Demises those blanked
And withheld acknowledgment
Disappears the subject of a self
As if it were a ghost
Of no magnitude or apparentcy.
A crime to be blanked
And yet also,
Crime in the one who blanks,
For the racist cauterises his own
Wholesome self in the violence
Of his denying
And lies as injured as his victim
In the victimhood of his division:
No longer seeing all the beautiful
Faces who are the whole of him.
Half his heart he disowns and cuts
From his being, settling in to the
Fraction of the self remaining,
So colourless and drained,
And denied of life’s real meaning
In the face of otherness rejected.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
In our reality
Thoughts shape the space
Of our dream.
A news item,
A Facebook outrage,
A horror,
Flares like guilt in the brain
And an abdominal twist of pain.
These are the food of nightmares.
Are they facts?
Possibly,
Probably,
Perhaps not.
For all the circled world is but a myth
Of savoured and soured dreams,
Where truths
Are malleable
And thoughts are bent
And perception
Is first machined by bias,
Changed by the colour of memory.
Our facts
Are not the solid stones we think
But slippery fish
With faces in multitude.
Not facts at all
But tellings and stories,
Mixed fictions and truths,
Happenings and imaginings,
Wishes and fears both,
Reported as the proper news
But perhaps not news at all,
Just the incessant re-posting of a viral fantasy.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
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