You can dial into love
As simply as smelling a rose,
As simply as taking a breath.
Dial into love
And feel the love that you feel:
It doesn’t matter if it’s for a pet,
A person alive or dead,
It doesn’t matter:
The warmth of love is the same.
Dial in to love:
Love that love:
Love and be loved
And step into the expanding realm
Swelling in your heart’s domain.
Taste the love that loves,
The love you have always been.
In the slowing moments
Of the settling day
Where stillness nears its absolute,
The honeysuckle dusk
Blooms in windlessness,
Prickling the senses
Of moths.
This is dying:
The day spent,
The light away
Beyond the curvature of the world,
The night
Not yet begun.
There are sounds:
Birds chuckling in the canopies,
The swishing of cars,
A throttling motorbike,
But all belong
In the settling,
All are borne upon the air,
All are called
By the magnitude
To witness,
To witness a death
More alive than words
Could ever carry or convey.
©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
The great man of seasons
Wakes at the apex of deep night
And winter’s shrunken solstice.
He tries the cracks of his eyes
In January’s skeletal underworld,
Perceives only the dormant trees
Upturned and rooted in freezing mists:
Their faraway lives in the ethers of dreams.
In February, time stretches.
The birds summon the bulbs.
Dawn steals two minutes from night
And dusk lingers, pinches two more.
By the seventh day
All the minutes of the month
Come as one welcome approach,
Snowdrops forerunning,
Outriders of the coming urge.
The earthen man stirs from slumber
In the barren mud,
Sits up in the flower bed
As a myriad of poking spears
Aimed at the newly sprung sun.
The coronations of daffodil kings
Are coming. As are the meteoric
Gear shifts of light,
And growth’s succulent mirroring
As air goes fresh to the breath
As is clean and clear to the head
In spring’s minting of newness.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
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
A certain tungsten light
In filaments elemental
And burning with a dust
To dab upon the backs of bees,
To make them golden
As the source
That brought the all
From unseeing gloom
To vivid definition
And pleasure to the mind’s eye.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
We are world
of lost magicians,
forgetting
the alchemy of our hands.
But look at the gardener
who with wands for fingers
summons the sweet ethers
of seasons
and coaxes lush forms
from the fine architecture
of mind, planting ideas
in soil’s enchantment
under the sun’s command.
Is he not creator above and beyond,
shaping reality to match
the deep archetypes
of his green heart’s desires:
a God, as any on high,
for in perpetuity he reins
among the beauty
of his earth bound legumes
and gifts of highfalutin flowers?
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The incomprehensible bud
Unsheathed of winter,
Awaits
Unbelievable expansion
In to the living myth of spring.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
If I could drink the sky’s cool mood
And mix
The light of first blossoms
So delicately sprinkled in
Then I would
Or breathe a draught of first warmed air,
White fragrance bathed
In sunshine’s friendly face
Arriving to the newness in me
Then I would
Imbibe them both
To feel this first fine sustenance.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Over most the world
She cascades,
Ever and always
Downward she falls,
And yet sometimes
In her ramblings she climbs,
With rings on every single finger
And butterflies in dreams,
Settling as momentary flowers
And garlands lifted beyond.
O she’s beautiful in her fringes
And ethereal reaches,
Beautiful in her bow
And salutation to the sun.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
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