Daubed on skin
And words alike:
All the shades
So coloured.
Hued by burning finger
And anger’s pointed flame:
Projection hurled
As flying wounds inflicted.
The stain: not on pure black skin
Or brown, or pink, or lily white
But on the eye
And on the mind,
On the filter
Through which we look
At the world
In its richness.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
In chill October England
the African waits incongruous
by the grey concrete divide
of a duel carriageway.
He wears a leopard skin hat
and the curly white beard of
an old man. In his hand,
a tool dangles like a nonchalant
machete. He has bare feet
and baggy shorts and has
come from the woods,
filled with cool heartbeats
of high latitudes. He hears
as he heard in his homeland:
the voices are different
but still voices, greener
and more tidal, sleeping
for half the year at least.
Yet his heart beats as full
of blood as when his calloused
feet scuffed red, dry earth,
and though all through his
eyes is a paler brother,
less rich, quelled
rather than vibrant,
the murmurings he feels
through his soles
are so similar in vibration
he cannot help but
accept the meek light
as home, and breathe in
the arrival of happiness.
copyright distilledvoice & Ben Truesdale
The old man watches
as time races:
all the young
frothing in its leading edge,
powerful on its surge,
the wave on which they surf:
confident like fearless children.
He was like them
in his unbeknownst youth,
careless with the ideas
of others: tossing them
for the new and exciting,
rubbishing the staid
and stilled establishment.
It irks him now,
not to see his work dismissed,
but that he has succumbed
to ageing’s inevitable drift
into beliefs hardening:
all of what he knows torn,
by the turn of the unconcerned,
from his grasp to hold it static.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Late butterfly
Basks in opportunity’s
Cloudless blue.
Dew-cold shadows creep
But in the light
It’s still summer.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
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 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
Dawn slides oblique
Between the flat shadows
Of night’s quiet layering,
Piques the corn-ripe air
Spiriting earth musk
From the damp leave’s
Cool-blooded undergrowth.
A chill hint
Of vapour in the breath,
Bumble bees slow
And sleepy,
Bird twitter in the bush,
The west leaf in day light’s tilt,
The east leaf, still suckling
In dim pockets
And grottos half shut.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The night rain
Loads the morning foliage,
Hauls each stem down
With a sheen.
The damp leaves
Lick the air,
Exfoliating pungencies
And sap soaked humidity,
Hunkering in rich breath
Of the wood scent,
Releasing stomatal volatiles
And chlorophyll astringencies,
Tempered by the nectars
Of bedraggled flowers,
Lolling before the sunshine
Straightens them.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
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
From dirt springs complexity
In the structure of flowers.
And to these
Come the elequance of bees,
Symbiotically bound
To the promiscuity
Of the plant’s future needs,
Yet self-serving on nectar’s
Seeping generosity
And suckling on plenty’s summer day
And its eternal rotations,
Both diurnal
And the season’s sleep
And interludes of wakefulness,
Through which the sun arouses
Generations of dormant seeds.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice
distilledvoice 