For Donna https://webleedwords.wordpress.com
At the critical
Point
Where paper
Meets pen,
You spend
The magnifying force
Of mind
And the heart’s voice
In concert,
And flourish
At the synapse
Where universe expands
To understanding
Newly defined.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Words wrought
Only for the images
Caused in the self
Called you,
Where writer
Cradles reader
As mother tends her child
And selfless watches
Reader grow.
Or
For pure self indulgence
Of words formed
In the pleasure
Of the pen,
Where writer
Carves the meaning
As close to likeness
As their inner kin,
No matter what the shape of it.
Or
In earthly paradox
Where self bridges
Selfishness to selfless gene,
And floats indifferent
Mid way between,
Unswayed by argument,
Just joyful
In creativity’s
Spontaneous emergence.
In the chalk stone village
Flint glints metamorphic
In shards of black sunlight
Mortared in the strata
Of a time when much
Was constructed from spare
Thoughts left lying around.
In the spring
Fledgling wisteria,
Delicate on the woody vine,
Take to the sky on pale green wings,
And garlands dangle voluptuous
Above each cottage door
And homely window frame.
And in the summer
Swallows spit and daub
Their dwellings under eaves
And flit the pink sky
Scoring invisible patterns
Of impermanence etched
With high swooping cries.
And in the autumn
The plants give up
The flush of summer’s
Vital light, let go the link
For approaching torpid night
And release their fruits
To future’s fertile cornucopia.
And in the winter,
The shabby season’s end,
Expectant bulbs await the sign
To push their green nibs
Beyond the hugging ground
And light the new year
Just as the last was so conjured.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Birds
Wet wing above
The scrub and stick
Of winter shrub
And leafless tree
Surfing
The rush and gust
And invisible bluffs
Warping sky’s
Endless grey.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
As you drove away
You looked over your shoulder
And smiled
And though there were ten steps
Of tarmac and the screen
Between us
I felt loved
And took your warm gift
As if you’d put it securely
In the palm of my hand.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
I’m on the London Underground. It’s a bit stuffy. The air is friction electricity, rush and surge. The carriage is about half full, I’d say, not more. An assortment of commuters sway with the movement of the train. Screeches and clattering echo in the dark tunnels but the passengers don’t hear. Or if they do, their faces give nothing away.
Strange faces: slack and free of expression. I wonder: who are these people? I look at each one and classify them with a form of mental taxonomy but my only tools are what my mind has used before. I put my memories to their faces, paint personalities, jobs, dreams on to the canvas of their skin but find the pictures to be mine, not theirs.
I have to admit, I have nothing but the thoughts I’ve thought before. I’ve killed these slack faced people even before they’ve uttered a word or made a movement or facial expression. I’ve fitted them up, put them in boxes, labelled them with stereotypes: colours, creeds, sexes, the way they wear their clothes, their hair. Every single stranger judged. The decision as to their identity, conceived and irrevocably made so they become fabricants wearing the fictions I have projected on to the facade of my contrived world.
I wonder if they killed the slack faced me they saw? Or perhaps they did something entirely different?
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
The mind
Tantalised by terror’s
Excitement,
Rubber stamps
Every violence,
Every incident,
And brands
Every normal madness
As terrorism
Born to our physical place.
And to the runaway dream
We add our angers,
And we rage
To do something against
The foe
Clothed
And created,
The anti image
Of our own
Disassociated face:
A glad enemy
Summoned
For us to fight.
And so we go
Hot headed,
The blood
Of foes
Desperate
To be let,
Our minds coalesced
In agreement’s
Blind conditioning
To go
Triumphant
And enthusiastic
To the next
Terrible war
Of mistakes.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Far off in the Western Sea of dreams and beginnings there was the birth of a story. It bubbled up from beneath, from deep in the gloom of a cold benthos, where strange things scuttle and make their homes. Some bubbles rise as stars while others are neutral. This one was like the very first born thought, as fresh as the newest thing, pale skinned and beautiful. From the waves of the Western Sea it rose high and caught prevailing winds. With birds and things airborne it navigated the Coriolis force and felt the call of land like a heart beat in its body. For days it watched and winged on blue ether and mist. And when it saw the brown earth it dropped like a stone and kissed the hard, dry soil and burrowed as its feeling decreed. And then it waited. And waited. And waited. And when the time was right it germinated on sweet water and the worlds urge to change and put up a shoot, then a leaf, then a flower: a new flower that no one had ever seen before.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
He might be Californian,
Shaggy
In flared denim suit
And long
Sun blond hair
Agitating his eyes.
He wears a moustache
And breath
Spiced bourbon and cigarette.
The days are a sun blanched
Headache while the nights
Are dizzying breakneck
Of life lived fast
With liquor cubed drink
Chinking glimmer in a glass,
Or bottle neat
From a brown paper bag
Hidden in a back street:
It’s all much of a muchness.
There are girls:
All with faraway look,
Smacked up
And drifting nowhere
On the drug of sex
And fleeting break
From loneliness
Found in strange
Bedfellow’s quiver
And alcoholic unburdening
Of orgasm before sleep.
He says – be cool baby –
To whom ever he meets
On the road,
Salutes them
With joint
Marihuana journey
Or acid trip
To nameless places,
Passing in a flurry of faces,
Hard as cold asphalt,
Futureless and travelling
Without name.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
In your work
I find mine
For my brush
Does seek
The peacock’s flush
And strut
And flares
The more
For your
Flouncing parade,
Your fan crowning,
Colourful display.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
distilledvoice 