Writing
Words come
Definite in the press of his pen
As if his ball point
Calls the very thing
To its truth
And written absolute
And carves a living thing
Upon the mind’s white page,
Then frees it
From the words’ vehicle
So the image
Stands real and proud
And wordlessly
Three dimensional.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
As if the brain
Could know the computations
Of the Universe:
The sum of all
Somehow divined.
The infinite equation
Of all things,
All actions,
All time,
And the web upon web of
Interactions between,
Somehow catalogued and counted!
This is control:
The thought of the petty tyrant.
The madness of the expert
Who pretends to know
But waits to to be dethroned.
The modern mind
Floating untethered from the
Grounded nuance
That to be human
Is to float untethered on love:
In the nothing that is everything,
In the space that is filled,
In the unknowing that is trust.
The complicated brain understands nothing.
Yet the simple heart knows it need only understand itself.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
I have seen your face before,
over plump and pumped in places
with fillers glossy and wishfully
young: meant to forget every mark
and memory of the life preceding,
meant to fight the foe of time.
Worn by so many women, fifty
something and reaching for youth’s
fashionably bland facsimile, whose
disappointing truth is mask as lifeless
as any purchased latex version of the
self: a faces see-through window
made so clumsily
in to a tinted wall.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Risen early with spring dawn;
Light is at the perfect golden angle
And the air is newly formed.
Footsteps on the cool, dew touched
Lawn and ears filled with bird chatter
And twittering: a wood pigeon cooing
With sweetening purr.
Where the sun has made a glade
Among buddlia foliage a hover fly
Alights a leaf and basks for a delicate
Moment: then again to the
Shimmering air.
God is near
Not in the far flung heavens.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
I always thought my Aunty Jan was a film star.
Perhaps it was her long nails varnished to a glossy red or her lip stick and carefully applied make up.
Perhaps it was the twinkle in her eye and the prettiness she wore so easily or the way she bent down to look at we adoring children, paying us a rare and beautiful moment, a snippet of another life, a gift other worldly and mysterious.
Thirty years on
and I can’t shake the feeling that she glides on charmed, celluloid magic and lives the screen life, passing effortlessly between the real, the silver, and the flickering multicoloured.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
She’s hot:
So hot she’s taken to shrinking
Behind dark glasses to avoid the
Harsh glare her reflection causes:
She wears her hair as a glossy veil.
In the beginning she sunned herself
In boys clumsy praises, and young
Mens’ too, but then came the daily
Recognition of all men; the staring,
The hungry eyes seeing her beautiful
Status and wanting some of that
Improving brightness to burnish
Themselves, like a ointment of
Loveliness applied to their skin.
And so now she hunkers down
Between her shoulders, shades
Herself in the arms of a celebrity,
Seeks out their star-touched kind,
For her lovely face has made her
Kin to them.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
I’ve been living in the cave of winter
and only knew it fully when spring’s
pulse flushed first in snowdrops and
buds bulging on the stems.
I’m awakened to the ground rush,
natures upsurge and levity behind
each tender shoot: the whole earth
intent to leaf and reclined to the
photon sun, its matter poured
eternally.
Like this my new garden arrives to my
eyes: a new flower gift each day, the
unexpected brought on spring wave
as herbaceous kind are called and
charmed, powerless on the tendril
energy.
With the scent of first flowers and
the colour of first butterflies, and first
bumble bees quick on the first sun
blasts, I realise the spring and wake
once more, as creatures wake from
their hibernation. All of us drawn from
the darkness to the light, new
warmness, the air crisp and perfect
as the very first beginning.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
I reach out in to the right side of my
brain, two inches back and two inches
above my right eye. I look through
that lens and call what I find to my
tongue, where I roll the matter until
vowel like and three dimensional.
Somehow my heart coats the thing
with a feeling until I can almost taste
the roundness of spoken word.
It lives for a moment in the excited
now until I cast it to the paper of the
page where, in ink, it lies back down
like a photograph or a pressed
flower’s two dimensional memory.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
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