The lonely heart
Is beyond tired:
It is absent.
Acknowledge the absence,
The dept
The insatiable wanting.
See it,
See the absolute truth
Of the hungry heart
And the deepest moment
Where two possibilities balance
Side by side,
Where one thing
Becomes its opposite,
And slides
From dept to fullness,
From hunger to wholeness
From wanting to satisfied,
For the heart is alive
And brimming
With warmth,
Not lonely
Or tired,
Just present.
Like a tide
Or the first sun-rays spilling
On the turning earth
At morning’s leading edge,
Warmth comes upon the famished
The starved,
The bankrupt
And the deprieved,
Changing them wholly,
Altering them irrevocably,
Illuminating
As they are witnessed.
The air in me
Is not mine.
The bone and the flesh,
And deeper defined –
The vessels, the nerves, the cells,
And deeper still – the molecules bound,
Are not me or mine,
But companions
In a movement of time.
Am I the river, a stream?
Am I the wind,
Am I the rain?
Together we are something
And nothing.
But alive is
This dance of form expressing,
Unfolding, degrading, re-expressing,
For this world is but a wondrous garment,
Worn and tore down
Worn and torn down
Worn and torn down,
Endlessly refreshing.
Moving in the garden
My body is free
As new expectant air,
Mellow in the coming.
The push of bulbs
Rises through my limbs,
The sap called by the source
To come and become.
Is there better than being,
Just being?
The gnats know,
Ascribing their wisdom
In choreography
Written on the breeze
Where the afternoon is nothing
But a pale yellow light.
With but a look
I am entranced,
Sucked inside the screen
And away
From my body,
Away from the world.
With but a look
I am inside the flurry of images,
And away from outward stimulus,
And for a moment
Or an hour
Or a day,
That physical place
I call the outside
Ceases to exist at all.
When you see it,
It is there,
For your seeing is like the hand of God
Reaching out,
Touching the emptiness
And turning it golden and solid.
Hold the image in your mind’s eye
And it is done:
A thought
Realised in an instant,
Made in the moment,
In the very moment it was conceived.
Bathe in the warm sea
Of universal light,
For it is near,
As near as your body.
You can reach for it,
Ask for it to warm your heart,
For it is as close to you
As your famished thoughts.
You can have it.
It is yours and always was,
You just turned away
For the briefest everlasting moment.
Long gone the deep night
The quiet night
The night of magics
Whispered across the cosmos.
We make our own stars now,
Fill the world
With our blindness
Of blackness’s silent retreat.
©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
We, the future
Froth upon the past,
Like lights girdering
The stanchioned and cemented rise
Of our skyward technological pride:
Apparently so different to our
Top-hatted and bonneted selves.
Yet sunk in the sump,
Our architecture founds itself
In skirts of steam empire
And Britannia
Greater than wishfulness.
I propose
The top hat to be
Present and near,
Not relinquished or pushed aside.
We are merely bareheaded
And not in the least bit changed.
©A Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
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
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