The Likes
Stamped
On my offered work
Are certainly
Gratification,
But
When you, genius friend –
Whose work
Is masterly
And touches
The substance
Of the wide eyed bridge
Between mind
And beautification,
– Like my words,
I am enthralled
With the closeness
Of creation
And I wish
Our touching
Was a friendship
In the real
Matter of the world.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
When prisons
Are lights
And birth places
Of the newly born.
Sanctuaries
For those in need,
The digressed children
Of the world,
Patterned and learned,
Patterned and learned.
Where time spent
Is rich maturation
In the loam
Of love.
Where all who leave
Are first made whole
And go,
Full of heart
Full of blood,
Gifted all
That they would steal,
Gifted all
That was withheld,
Gifted all
That they would need.
Gifted.
They leave gifted.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Red throat invitation
To late harvest.
Autumnal fade
To sun stretched yellow.
Leaves freckled
And close
To golden
Old age
And the thin skinned
Invisibility
Before crisp release
And disappearance.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Like lights
Jeweling city sprawl
Below the sky borne plane,
Flowers
Are various
In their
Luminous display.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Nearly all
Are coaxed
To fall
And join
The swallowing ground
And its earthly convey.
Yet
Some things
Are still
Opening.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
My novel has become somewhat unruly. Until this morning, I hadn’t seen it for a couple of days. Then when I came down for breakfast, there it was, waiting for me, crouching at the bottom of the stairs. But oh my goodness, how it had grown. It was at least seventeen times bigger than I remember and its mouth parts were out of all measure and proportion.
I must say, it halted me in my sleepy decent. I was a little confused as to what to do. Was I to brush past as if it were normal size and without huge fangs and teeth in their multitude. Or was I to flee, scampering up the stairs to exit through the bathroom window. In the end, it made the decision. For as I pondered my choices, it pounced.
Luckily, my martial arts have taught me much. And so with the agility God has favoured me, I ducked and the beast flew straight over my head. I saw its underbelly as it went in a high arc and my worst fears were actualised. Its gut was plump with far too many words and bulged with a peculiar menace. I estimated that it must be a hundred weight, if not more. A terrible thought entered my mind at that point: I had conjured a monster. I was Frankenstein, and this thing, my work.
As it flew over, I took my chance, dashed below and slipped in to the kitchen where I found two things: a broom and poker from my wood burning stove. With these weapons I charged in to the fray. And all was violent ugliness. It bit and scraped and hit out with a rank verbiage and a mouth so full of words. Yet I parried, deflected, spun on the axis of a dance made of martial arts and hopefulness, and for a moment thought myself to be winning.
But then it unleashed its poetry. Oh God, how that hurt. A thousand lashes of its rhyming tongue. A thousand passages of its disappointments. Its woes fired like missiles to strike me down. All that awfulness rolled in to one grievous assault. Its power knocked me to the ground. I was paralysed. And then, it sat upon me with its full weight. It was a ton at least. A ton of words. A ton of sentences. The whole unedited mass crushing the breath from my lungs. Surely I was about to die.
But no. From beneath I saw its weakness. Its binding was not well strung. In fact, it was still in its crapy little ring folder. I took the knife, that I keep in my pyjamas, and stuck it in the gap. The clasps pinged open; so full was it stuffed. And in a instant the beast was done. It disintegrated before my eyes. Pages spewed and fluttered in the air. The chapters shuffled like a deck of cards. The whole thing punctured and deflating as if it were composed of hot air and nothing more.
But when I saw it dismembered and pitiful, I couldn’t strike the killing blow. Instead my heart went out to it. I gathered up its limbs and appendages. I nursed it as best I could, applying hot poultices and wiping away its tears. I collected the spare words (there were many) and hung the sentences out to dry (they were wet with sweat). When I left it on the sofa, watching shit TV, it looked as close to happy as ever I’ve seen. And when I popped a warm blanket across its first page, for comfort and warmth, I think it almost smiled at me.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Out of the mouth
Via the air
To the ears.
Imagination plays its part
In conception
Of ideas,
Of how
And why.
And like that
The view point
Expands,
Resembles a fact
Becomes a bit like a truth,
Ever Growing
In to something like
The real thing.
And then
Once cooked,
Once fiddled,
Once deceived
It spews out dogmatic
And unrestrained,
Exits
As it is born,
The truth formed,
The truth made,
The fact ejected
Out of the mouth….
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
What blindness is this
That sees
The mind
Creative
On the page
Even where the ink
Is absent and forgetting?
For surely
I see the words
Formed perfect
On the paper
With these eyes
Of mine.
Yet others
Find
In the form,
Omissions
And lack
Where my mind
Has conjured
And bridged
And leapt
Across the cracks.
And if
In my blindness
I still see
Words fully formed
And correctly ended,
Then what
In the real world,
Beyond the pen,
Have I also
Made perfect?
What gaps
In reality
Have I
Fabricated?
What have my eyes
Seen
In the jurisdiction
Of belief,
Unreal to all but me
Who paints
Stencils and stained glass
On lenses
Through which
I look
In order
I might see
The things
I wish
Rather than
What is actually present.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Today I fancied the life of a wandering bard and poet. And so with a spring in my step and the birds tweeting in the joyous air I selected my favourite knapsack, packed it with green cheese and a hunk or two of bread, some fine olives and a red apple, and slung it on a pole.
With provisions aplenty I went out the door, not forgetting my poets peaked cap, complete with a feather for inspiration. And of course I wore my best bard-ish jerkin, to keep me warm around the midriff and hopeful in mind. I went not empty handed: a book of plain pages clasped in my fingers, my quill expectant and quivering.
I strolled a good league before I met a (would be) patron in the village of Cowley. He leant nonchalant against a wall with fermentation thick about his person, a beverage loose in his hand. He smoked a Woodbine and had rummy eyes to see the world around. I thought him decent enough for a try of the rhythm in my mind. And so I said to him:
“Good sir, toss me a ducat and I shall sing a merry tune or write a rhyme in this book here, that once done will be yours for the keeping.”
And to this he said: “fuck off.”
“Good sir,” I said, “which ditch have you dug for those words that come tumbling, for I should have them for my book.”
And he said: “fuck off you twat.”
And I smiled and said: “you sir, are a wit. I know it. You play with me as if I were a child. At first I thought those words were dirt, but you use them so well. They fall off your lip like watery cascade. They flow as nature’s voice in wind and breeze alike. Pray do tell me some more.”
And to this he said (you’ve guessed it): “Fuck off.”
And so with a salute and a smile I went on my merry way.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
The world spins
On instant access
Where secrets
Divulge
In the second of their conception
And news
Burns like star-fall
And dies as quickly
To the black
And old.
And time,
Shackled workhorse
To the mind
Careers
As never should
It fall precious
Past uncaring hand
And fingers barely touching,
Racing
Itself to panting
Wreck and ruin:
All of what it’s worth
Spent
In a flash
Of fast food
And capitalism,
Memorised
Even before
Its moment
Of occurrence
And physical birth.
The future
Travelling
To the past
But heart bypassed
So as not to happen
In the now
At all.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
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