She finds the dream
On spring days, in old villages,
In gardens and in flowers.
Something happens
As if reacting to the sun
For she shines like yellow petals
And smiles, her face upturned
And her eyes closed.
She absorbs
And then offers back her radiance.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Words come
Definite in the press of his pen
As if his ball point
Calls the very thing
To its truth
And written absolute
And carves a living thing
Upon the mind’s white page,
Then frees it
From the words’ vehicle
So the image
Stands real and proud
And wordlessly
Three dimensional.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
As if the brain
Could know the computations
Of the Universe:
The sum of all
Somehow divined.
The infinite equation
Of all things,
All actions,
All time,
And the web upon web of
Interactions between,
Somehow catalogued and counted!
This is control:
The thought of the petty tyrant.
The madness of the expert
Who pretends to know
But waits to to be dethroned.
The modern mind
Floating untethered from the
Grounded nuance
That to be human
Is to float untethered on love:
In the nothing that is everything,
In the space that is filled,
In the unknowing that is trust.
The complicated brain understands nothing.
Yet the simple heart knows it need only understand itself.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
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.
It is good because it offers only the witnessing. It sees something beautiful and sees it. And like the soul, passively observes with no thought beyond to control or complicate. It seeks nothing from you but offers wholly its world.
There is its simple purity. It speaks without words. It does not tell.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
I always thought my Aunty Jan was a film star.
Perhaps it was her long nails varnished to a glossy red or her lip stick and carefully applied make up.
Perhaps it was the twinkle in her eye and the prettiness she wore so easily or the way she bent down to look at we adoring children, paying us a rare and beautiful moment, a snippet of another life, a gift other worldly and mysterious.
Thirty years on
and I can’t shake the feeling that she glides on charmed, celluloid magic and lives the screen life, passing effortlessly between the real, the silver, and the flickering multicoloured.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
She’s hot:
So hot she’s taken to shrinking
Behind dark glasses to avoid the
Harsh glare her reflection causes:
She wears her hair as a glossy veil.
In the beginning she sunned herself
In boys clumsy praises, and young
Mens’ too, but then came the daily
Recognition of all men; the staring,
The hungry eyes seeing her beautiful
Status and wanting some of that
Improving brightness to burnish
Themselves, like a ointment of
Loveliness applied to their skin.
And so now she hunkers down
Between her shoulders, shades
Herself in the arms of a celebrity,
Seeks out their star-touched kind,
For her lovely face has made her
Kin to them.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
