In contrast:
Utility and the flirtatious
Stand unperturbed
Side by side.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & Distilledvoice
poems
Artist Flower
From the medium
In which the leaf reclines
And absorbs
Warm solar muse,
Pure art
Forms as the perfect
Opening flower
And blessed
Replication of the sun:
A depiction
Of the source
From which
All lives spawn
And irrevocably come.
copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & Distilledvoice
Spring Dance Of Freedom
The earth turns
In incremental light.
The day expands
In millimetre shoots,
A green touch
Like lovers’ skin
Mirroring pale light
And new sun contours.
Each bulb nestles
In the mother’s pulse,
Follows exact
Circadian match:
The beautiful dance
Of closest partners.
Like all living things
In sweet, earthy bondage,
Not one strays
Nor splits disobedient
From irrefutable law
And physical fact
Of freedom
To be absolved,
And to shadow
First, ethereal footsteps.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Solvent Self
In a vat of solvent self
Dissolve
The misodgynists,
The sexists,
The feminists,
The chauvinists,
The racists
And the belief in race.
Come clean
Of factions
And clothes born
Of woven ideas.
Come clean
Of rightness certainty
When wrongness dwells ugly
In the world,
Despised in the eyes despising.
Dissolve all but the body
So every baggaged word
And every loaded thought
Washes clean
Of the child skin
And perception uncluttered.
Now, arise O beautiful
Painted epidermal rainbow:
Matter not your fine colour
Or your sex
Or the changing whims
Of thoughts
On their long journey
Through conundrum unraveling.
Anchor in the free form
Of love instead
And hold each tight conviction
As if it were loose
In the hand,
Without limpet fear protection
Bandaged to its health.
Arise O beautiful life,
Undecided in thought
Like the open eyed babe
Who once entered
This world,
But forgot –
With each brick wall decision,
Layered in the constructed self
– that he was free,
Without encumbrance
And the useful/useless adherence
To the painful past.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Poem Photographer
Sometimes
She searches for poems,
Roves over
Innumerable things
With a hope
Her eye might catch
A suchness
And florescence
Glowing real
In the edges
Of interest.
And so to the woods
For knot, bird and lichen
Hosted in the crenellations
Of ecosystems’ burgeoning.
And to the city streets,
Angular in architectural
Masterpieces and rhombus
Network’s crystalline form.
And to the face of child,
Old man and worn woman
Storytelling in wrinkles
And light shining eyes.
But sometimes,
Caught unawares,
She finds the thing
In the corner of her eye,
Like an insistent child
Demanding attention,
A nugget gleaming treasureful
In the open hand
Of the high carat sand
And the riverbed of imagery.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
For Melinda https://thepoetryofphotography.wordpress.com
And all the other talented photographers I follow.
Synapse
For Donna https://webleedwords.wordpress.com
At the critical
Point
Where paper
Meets pen,
You spend
The magnifying force
Of mind
And the heart’s voice
In concert,
And flourish
At the synapse
Where universe expands
To understanding
Newly defined.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
For Whom This Poem?
Words wrought
Only for the images
Caused in the self
Called you,
Where writer
Cradles reader
As mother tends her child
And selfless watches
Reader grow.
Or
For pure self indulgence
Of words formed
In the pleasure
Of the pen,
Where writer
Carves the meaning
As close to likeness
As their inner kin,
No matter what the shape of it.
Or
In earthly paradox
Where self bridges
Selfishness to selfless gene,
And floats indifferent
Mid way between,
Unswayed by argument,
Just joyful
In creativity’s
Spontaneous emergence.
A Year In The Chalk Stone Village
In the chalk stone village
Flint glints metamorphic
In shards of black sunlight
Mortared in the strata
Of a time when much
Was constructed from spare
Thoughts left lying around.
In the spring
Fledgling wisteria,
Delicate on the woody vine,
Take to the sky on pale green wings,
And garlands dangle voluptuous
Above each cottage door
And homely window frame.
And in the summer
Swallows spit and daub
Their dwellings under eaves
And flit the pink sky
Scoring invisible patterns
Of impermanence etched
With high swooping cries.
And in the autumn
The plants give up
The flush of summer’s
Vital light, let go the link
For approaching torpid night
And release their fruits
To future’s fertile cornucopia.
And in the winter,
The shabby season’s end,
Expectant bulbs await the sign
To push their green nibs
Beyond the hugging ground
And light the new year
Just as the last was so conjured.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
Winter Fall
All loose
From the sap flow
Nourishment.
All ground dwelling
And russet blush:
Egg speckled,
Wrinkle-rind
And pith withered.
All in sepia age
And near translucency,
The fading fruit
Engorged
By the swallowing ground.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
On Winter Wing
Birds
Wet wing above
The scrub and stick
Of winter shrub
And leafless tree
Surfing
The rush and gust
And invisible bluffs
Warping sky’s
Endless grey.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
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