O what solar incandescence,
Warm upon the face,
For us to freely take
From source
Diurnal everlasting.
And O what sustenance
In which we bathe
And garner flesh,
So we might glide
Upon the motive wing
High above it all,
Absorbing precious gift
In updrafts,
Light as breath
Of daffodil glowing
In yellow flush expressed.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
In the countryside
Hawthorn flirts salacious,
Fluorescing champagne heady
In puffs of magic breath
Strung light upon the hedgerow’s
Dour skeletal winter branch,
Split and thankfully broken
By plethora encrustations
In scores of tiny white flowers.
In the town and village
The roads become boulevards
In which magnolia offer
Perfect molluscs
To the neat and leafless,
And cherry blossoms
Enlighten the spirit
Like wedding bells
And confetti heaped,
While winter jasmine,
In shocks of vivid yellow,
Leaps out and streaks
In lurid flares of flagrant disbelief.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The blue mists
Of evening’s closure
Blurs vistas
To dreams
And wending paths
Petering and smudged
Until the far hills
Clump with tree forms
To places adrift
White vapours
Plump with beginnings
And mystic spaces
In which only the shrill bird call
Punctuates.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Upon your mortal flesh
my eyes, excited to new seeing,
find windows
in which the script
unravels like quicksilver ink
heart-fast across the page,
and sees off
the mood mundane
written boring in to static fact
of joyless unbecoming,
and instead
thrills the moments in their chain,
and makes them
stones for stepping,
and feet, light for skipping,
as if life, after all,
were not ceaseless, aggravated toil
but flight, free upon the wing.
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
In the geometry
Of blue horizons
And skirting beach
I find a boat
Paint peeling
And silvery
In the coral sand.
In the end
All things bleach:
The wooden seat,
The coral shingle,
The old man
Whose facial stubble
Grows white
As the particulate
He stands upon.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
They could be beings
Stepping from the light,
Holidaying where their world
Is burned on the beach
And paved upon the water
Like an avenue
To the sun’s blinding portal.
They could be water nymphs
Drawn by the pathway
Polished on the boundary
Between aqueous
And the air’s
More transient mix.
They could be boys
Doused in gold,
In sheen of salt water sweat
And light guilded fringes,
Frolicking in shimmering skins,
Oiled to perfect
Frictionless cartwheels
Found in the fluid
Of each childish leap
And featureless silhouette.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
He holds the cigarette
With his lip.
As he speaks
It nods its agreement.
In his hand is a beer,
At home
Quite naturally.
An eau de vie lubricant.
In his face is a scowl,
An irritation
As if most things
Were shit
Or, he’s cool
To offer disinterest.
A shrug and a pout
In detachments shout,
Ejected from the self,
Thrown out
And projected
As the very loudest silence.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
Beneath the succulent leaves,
In the shadow cast
Where harsh sun
Fragments
To a gentle dappling,
Proboscis flowers
Scent the musty undergrowth
With sweetness derived
From intense concentration.
Like the artist
Who dedicates the hours
To find a pure manifestation,
The flower too
Is single minded
In its delicate craft
And delights in its creation.
copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
From the medium
In which the leaf reclines
And absorbs
Warm solar muse,
Pure art
Forms as the perfect
Opening flower
And blessed
Replication of the sun:
A depiction
Of the source
From which
All lives spawn
And irrevocably come.
copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & Distilledvoice
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