Stem in its natural turgid curve.
Chin lifted by the sun.
‘Be my reflection,’ says the sun.
‘But be a flower, first and foremost.’
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
buddha
Tree Happening
A tree casts its multitude seeds to the world: ‘I give you this,’ it says to life, ‘for you to wear. My children are the footprint in which you tread, the clothes in which the future beds and once again emerges.’
‘All beings are thus: loaded with infinite ways in which life might balance on ‘nows’ narrow path. And by the wayside, the seeds as yet unlocked: not wasted, but the glad price of reality’s weave and weft upon happening’s wide and well trodden map.’
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Multiverse
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
Wind Chimes
Stirring in the gentlest breeze
Wind chimes
Bob soundless:
I hear in their silence
The near fountain
Tappling cool in many droplets
To the pool’s perturbed rest
Of bubbles swayed
By concentric rippling
And breaths in pulsing evenness.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Delicious Light
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
Worship
It’s as if the spirit,
Pale green and new,
Brushed our realm
For the briefest instant,
Igniting the cool magnitude
Wrapped in guts of plants
So all are suddenly aware
And blinking and charged
And rolling on in lattices
And internal xylem flows,
Abandoned to their task
To raise the sexual forms
Of flowers in to the high air,
Burgeoning with all the winged
Busyness and assistance
Brought by the sun’s worship.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Wizard
He spins his breath
In to a spell
Of enigma circling,
Like an auric cloak of twisting fog
Behind which he ducks
In the maintainence of mystery.
What dwells within the vortex
Behind the wall of half
Answered questions
And glimpses
Drawn away by the spell?
Is there a mystery within
Or only the wish of mystery
And its subtle trickery
Of the hidden man?
I invite you,
Wizard behind the spell of
Manipulated wonderment:
Step forward, naked and without the
Swirling clothes that hide your name
And deflect every question
To a riddle in a cul de sac.
Step out, Wizard.
Is not real magic,
To be visible, straight forward,
Unclothed and vivid as the thing
Unashamed and confident:
The mysterious wand set down,
The spell dispersed,
The conjuring acquitted,
The self beneath, unmasked.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Cherry Blossom
A day or two at most
In this floriferous moment,
Where white is defined
In garlands
And upon the breeze
And strewn upon the green.
The garden in pale fresh notes,
Hardly even a thing
Before altered
And borne away
Upon the wind filled clouds
Searching in the blueness.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
On The River
For Mima
She drifts on a dream
That is a river,
One hand playfully trailing
In her wake,
Fingers idly
Tracing the ripples
At her fingertips.
She hums in sweet mellow moods:
Time unravelling
Like the gentle welling
Of the slow current.
She thinks:
Some live their lives
Adrift the river,
Holding nothing
Of the passing life
But the feeling
Flowing on meander’s
Subtle pondering.
She thinks:
I should like that life
And the peace
Found in the waltzing leaf,
In its slow and submerged tumbling
And ever rolling motion forward,
Drawn on always by the river’s irresistible pull.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Blue Mists Of Evening
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
distilledvoice 