The fear of movement
Steers the knife
And stills the flesh
In to a mask,
Free of wrinkles
And evidence
Of time past
And existence happening.
As if the demanding child
Were given
Its every shouted wish,
To go against
Life’s natural ageing path
And join
The Yes-Men horde
Branding the tampered
And augmented look
As the ‘must be’
– New beautiful –
For every old
Who holds too tight
To that which
Has long since departed.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
I have seen your face before,
over plump and pumped in places
with fillers glossy and wishfully
young: meant to forget every mark
and memory of the life preceding,
meant to fight the foe of time.
Worn by so many women, fifty
something and reaching for youth’s
fashionably bland facsimile, whose
disappointing truth is mask as lifeless
as any purchased latex version of the
self: a faces see-through window
made so clumsily
in to a tinted wall.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
distilledvoice 