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.
I do not know you
Though
For your eyes
And your mind
I pen
What thought and beauty
I can find
Right here.
And I wish it
Sent upon the wind
Or voyaged on promises kept
And letters sent,
A union conveyed
Upon a word,
Upon the thought,
Upon a sentiment,
One
That we might share
In mind
Of distant togetherness.
© 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
We are friends
Who craft
The art of
Word,
Article
Or photograph,
Offering each day
These
Mind made things
Carved from our hearts
Mused interpreting,
Presenting our work
Like the bird makes its nest
Or the tree
Falls in with the seasons:
We do what we do
Because we must.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
As if
The mind
Were idle fascination,
Full of dreams,
Full of inconsiquencial
Speculation
And non-participation
In the formation
Of the physical world.
As if
Our behaviour
Were cut loose,
Let loose
Unrestricted,
To roam free
Upon the earth
Without ownership
To count
The scores
Of futures conceived.
As if
We were vagrants
Who’s vagrant belief
Were not owned
In the body
But put out
To all visible peers
In blames
Savage hand
And life’s
Absent redundancy.
As if
The mind
Were not
Conceiving machine,
Coating every idea
In touchable cloak,
Transmuting
Idea’s ethereal stream
From unseen secret
To the solid matter
Of the corporeal.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Sometimes
I reach for the beautiful pen
Wanting
Loops
And graceful turns
Of poetry
To please the page
But find
My fingers fat as sausages
And the pen,
A cactus.
And my heart
Pumping sand
Through the plaque
Congealed
Narrowness
Of my veins
And so I write
The wrongness
So it might
Shift
From staid
And stillness
To the curves
Of energy flow,
The hopeful pen
Smooth on inky magic,
And once again imprinted
With tenderness untroubled.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
What blindness is this
That sees
The mind
Creative
On the page
Even where the ink
Is absent and forgetting?
For surely
I see the words
Formed perfect
On the paper
With these eyes
Of mine.
Yet others
Find
In the form,
Omissions
And lack
Where my mind
Has conjured
And bridged
And leapt
Across the cracks.
And if
In my blindness
I still see
Words fully formed
And correctly ended,
Then what
In the real world,
Beyond the pen,
Have I also
Made perfect?
What gaps
In reality
Have I
Fabricated?
What have my eyes
Seen
In the jurisdiction
Of belief,
Unreal to all but me
Who paints
Stencils and stained glass
On lenses
Through which
I look
In order
I might see
The things
I wish
Rather than
What is actually present.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
The idea for a novel arrived this morning. I was quite surprised. But I was more surprised when it burrowed through my mind and then crawled out of my ear, perching on the arm of the sofa, as natural as a young novel can be. It blinked at me and then, much quicker than I thought novels could move, scurried in to the next room. I tried to catch it but my fingers were quite stiff from not typing and my body co-joined to the sofa. When eventually I managed to pry myself off the couch I went to look for the little bugger. To my annoyance I found that it had completly disappeared.
I spent an hour looking around the skirting boards on my hands and knees, shouting out abuse for the sheer joy of being in a bad mood. I once lost a short story in the same way, only to find it cohabiting with a house spider under the sofa. I never managed to get it back and it lives there to this day, taunting me with perfectly formed quips and insults wrapped in spider webs. I try to ignore its outbursts but they are just so – to the point – and without the verbiage of self indulgence. Anyway, digression will earn me a sticky web on my lips if I speak a word of this out loud.
Eventually I found the little blighter (the novel) hunkered in a mouse hole, crying softly. Curiously it had taken the form of a squat lobster and had a pair of tiny but perilously sharp pincers for a voice. I have the lacerations to prove I am not deaf and my fingers smart: salt and cold sting hot. Of course, I tried to reason with it. And when that failed I whispered a lullaby and calm words, to tell it that I loved it just the way it was. But alas, the lobster was having a crisis. And no words of mine could bring it from its hiding place.
I’m going to leave it over night and hopefully the fresh new day will give it wings and the metamorphosis from skeptical, armoured idea to the plump, soft juvenile that it might just be. I really hope that the cat doesn’t get it in the night. So many fledgling thoughts have succumbed to that fate: gobbled up whole or left as lifeless gifts on my back door step, trouble no more but unfulfilled in their infancy, their potential dashed.
I might just feed the cat an extra helping of ice cream and trash tv so he is fat and happy and far too lazy to hunt a young novel on its first day. Lethargy makes a cuddly pussycat out of a killer, I find. And a full belly makes his claws retract so his hands are but soft pads and gentle mittens, and a flannel to wash his beautiful face.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Warm as I wake,
Still clothed
In the arithmetic
Of dreams;
A few sentiments
Found
Like gold flecks
In the pan,
Tangible and inert
To oxidising approach
Of the fast and probable day.
Yet there they are,
Untarnished evidence
Of my mind’s wandering,
Its sinuous, filamentous
Questioning
In to that untapped,
That mystical
And incorporeal.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
distilledvoice 