art

The Artist’s Way

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Immersed in the landscape

Or fixated on an object,

This artist does not paint

What his eyes see,

Rather, he absorbs the sight,

Places it

In the cauldron of his being

Where life seeps

As the language of the soul.

It is this he paints,

This aliveness

Mirroring landscape or thing:

His spirit

And God’s spirit

Dancing as one

Infinite being,

And reaching out

To his poised fingers,

To transform the inanimate

And deliver magic on the canvas,

Every stroke of his brush imbued

With the inward spirit he feels.

Identity Trap

~ distilledvoice ~ 3 Comments

You sit there

In your skin of ideas:

What you’ve learnt,

What you’ve imbibed,

Parroting out

Your culture

–

Just as I am spewing mine.

–

And in all this soup of thoughts,

A million-hand reused,

We take our arbitrary stand

Against each other’s placards,

Clinging upon the cliff edge of identity,

Fingers bloodless

In the fear of where we might fall.

–

But if we were loose in our thoughts,

Seeing them as harmless

Products of an endlessly spitting machine,

And not really ours at all,

Might we see

That the apparent void

Into which we might fall

Is no void to be feared

But an endless source of spaciousness.

Master Artist Of The World

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Now, right now

I dwell in future doom

In which

What could be

Sprawls out

As a dismal landscape.

I’m in pain,

A heaviness rides upon my back

The now

Is a polluted stream

With no hope

Or respite from darkness.

–

For some time

I believe this truth,

The fact darkening the now,

Which I think must be endless.

Then, I wonder,

I query this “truth”

Threatening to pull me asunder,

And lift the curling edge

Of my feeling,

Glimpsing a flicker of light.

–

Could this feeling really be

But the consequence of thought,

My thought

Projected out

And so colouring

The whole world?

Could this world

Be but a blank canvas

And my thought

The paint on the pallet

And the brush in my hand?

Could it really be

That I am master artist

Applying tint

And shade

To all I see,

Reality fluxing before my eyes

As thoughts

Conjure feelings

Morphing under the spell of my eye

And dancing to my every preconception?

–

And if so,

What does that mean for truth

And a “real world” out there,

And the me

Who thought himself buffeted

By forces beyond

And things

Other than himself?

Instagram

~ distilledvoice ~ 4 Comments

The whole world is my stage

The catwalk on which I pout

Performing My sexy sexy –

Look at Me, look at My life,

Look at My happy happy image

Filled with My stuff, My shiny things,

My tits and My gym body bliss

And all the holidays

I could ever wish

Distilled into one perfect shot:

One contrived glass of fizz

Against a perfect sunset

Where all the angst of life

Is edited out

And brushsstroked clean,

Proving Me special

And different without doubt

In a tsunami of content, this

Bland-sewering-scum-tide onslaught

Of same and same and Noisy same

Ejaculated on to the face of My screen.

🤪👍💪🏼🤮

Legacy

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We, the future
Froth upon the past,
Like lights girdering
The stanchioned and cemented rise
Of our skyward technological pride:
Apparently so different to our
Top-hatted and bonneted selves.
Yet sunk in the sump,
Our architecture founds itself
In skirts of steam empire
And Britannia
Greater than wishfulness.

I propose
The top hat to be
Present and near,
Not relinquished or pushed aside.
We are merely bareheaded
And not in the least bit changed.

©A Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017

Immigrant

~ distilledvoice ~ 1 Comment

In chill October England
the African waits incongruous
by the grey concrete divide
of a duel carriageway.

He wears a leopard skin hat
and the curly white beard of
an old man. In his hand,
a tool dangles like a nonchalant

machete. He has bare feet
and baggy shorts and has
come from the woods,
filled with cool heartbeats

of high latitudes. He hears
as he heard in his homeland:
the voices are different
but still voices, greener

and more tidal, sleeping
for half the year at least.
Yet his heart beats as full
of blood as when his calloused

feet scuffed red, dry earth,
and though all through his
eyes is a paler brother,
less rich, quelled

rather than vibrant,
the murmurings he feels
through his soles
are so similar in vibration

he cannot help but
accept the meek light
as home, and breathe in
the arrival of happiness.

 

copyright distilledvoice & Ben Truesdale

August Morn

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Dawn slides oblique
Between the flat shadows
Of night’s quiet layering,
Piques the corn-ripe air
Spiriting earth musk
From the damp leave’s
Cool-blooded undergrowth.

A chill hint
Of vapour in the breath,
Bumble bees slow
And sleepy,
Bird twitter in the bush,
The west leaf in day light’s tilt,
The east leaf, still suckling
In dim pockets
And grottos half shut.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

Multiverse

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Some peer for heaven’s star-load,
Grappling with infinite mathematics
And paradox strewn colourful
Beyond the impossible reach of the mind.

And yet others peer close as home
And find the universe layered
In unending planes, thick with reality
In which life forms inhabit.

To look is to exclude the rest,
Understanding found in the narrowing
Of the pin point eye, alive on the observed
But unconscious of other and else.

What dwells where we cannot see,
Where our minds have yet to examine,
Where are backs are turned
And worlds are yet to be seen?
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016