Gnats rise
To their dusk dance:
Life in transient, delicate form
Upon the stillness of mist
Dewing in the blue
Of copse and dell’s hollow.
An echo of the spring warmth
That touched the ground
And energised
The display upon the dim edges
Of the nearing night,
Bringing lives
To delicacies and finesse
With hardly a wingbeat
To keep them buoyant
And borne on sunlight’s shadow.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Where is the boy lost
In the journey to the man?
Where is the balance point
In which he slips in metamorphosis
Through youth toward old age,
In transit of time’s
Morphing body become?
Perhaps he is not lost
But changed in skin
And greying hair
And stiffness in the bones,
The boy alive
But draped in memory’s
Encrustations
That sway the free thoughts
Of boyish dreams
From all their boyish freedoms.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
A fan worm spreads out its feathery tentacles to collect the plentiful nutrient.
Coral polyps reach in to the current
and grab minuscule particles, while in symbiosis with the sun, they feel green algal blood oxygenate their livelihood.
Palatial sponges sift and gulp
vast quantities of the plankton soup.
Encrusting species cling to every
projection, cliff face and under hang, ever tasting blue movement.
Flecks of fish in sinosoidal pulse
weave and dance on the constant
flow, and shoal in bodies of mirroring.
Anemones and soft corals loose in
the waft, put up their ploom and
await sustenance borne upon the
liquid conveyor.
And more fish flutter in plethora of
colour and swim like May cherry petals fall.
One might infer trust, if a thought
were at all buoyant on the coral wall but thoughts aren’t currency
underwater, and to think is to divide from the source of it all. Yet the coral wall endures as ever it has. And millimetre coral growth spans perfect meters in a statement of enrichment sustained.
Only man conceptualises a synario in opposition to what the corals and the fish simply know.
copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
Still the dogged pioneer spirit
Owning protocol and government.
Still the époque of first footsteps
On the shore of the new world.
Still strident explorers
Followed by makeshift populous.
Still the gold-rush
For buried commodity.
Still value of money
Above the the richness of place.
Still the dampening
Of primitive voice.
Still the damaging hand
Assassinating loveliness.
*
These are the end times
Of carelessness,
The deep tectonic shift
In the solitary man,
In the mind
Of every man,
From rootless
To gia-joined:
The umbilicus revealed
In waking of earth
In the feeling body
And connection
To all that was disembodied
And heartless pushed out.
These are the end times
And times of new beginning.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
Every holiday snap
Is a slap
Right across your face,
Dear reader, watcher, liker,
Cos I’m the smug vacation maker
Whose wall you’ve reluctantly
Signed to yours.
And if you were here
I’d bore you to tears
But as you’re not
I’ll just smack you across the chops
With how lovely a time
I’m having
Under the smug sun
Next to the smug water
In the smug dream
That stinks
Of all the self importance
I could manageably conjure.
copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
Winter jasmine
Impossible on the branch,
Juxtaposes against
The season’s hour,
Flowers in contrast
And yellow distinction.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
The beast is muzzled
And drooling
And straining at the lead
As if its owner’s
Distrustful eyes
And heavy
Auric clouds
Swirling
In dark stars
Of circumference hatred,
Transfuse
Umbilical
And fill the dog
With lust for blood
And teeth sharp
In every direction.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
If at the core
There is violence
Of the self
Against the source
All the health thoughts
Conceived
Or applications put,
Won’t alter
Or bring life
To the body,
Who’s passenger
Rejects
The fundamental
Principle
Of love
And murders instead
The energy
As it emerges
In free form
Child emotive.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
In the trees’
Brown shedding,
Loosened in November’s
Murk
And grey clouded
Movement
Northerly,
And with the lessening,
Light falling back
In earth’s tilt
Wintery,
Gusts come
To lick the leaves,
Scurry them
If they will heap
And hurry,
Or Drive the well wrapped,
Buttoned-up shoppers,
Bluster haired
And wind blithery,
To tread them
From browns to black,
If already
Moist paper,
Mulch layering
The sticky pavement walked.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
I could drink the mist
With inward
Passage
Of breath
Cool and wholesome
To the lungs,
An air
Weighted moist
And though
Still vapour
No less fluid
Deeply quenching
Organs
In their need
To thirst.
Are we not
All sponges,
Open pored,
In-fluxed
And anointed?
Are we not
Osmosed
In love?
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
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