race

Identity Struggle

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

We wear our race like a heavy cloak

Painting our skins with uncomfortable ideas.

We wear our gender like lead boots,

Stumbling in discomfort proclaimed as ease.

We wear our sexuality like a brightly

Coloured mask.

Our religion and politics

We wear as indomitable rightness.

Our point of view

Is an impenetrable stone castle

Fortified until the last soldier is killed.

Our countries are emblems

For which many will die.

So many are the dividing lines,

The fractious ideas,

For we are tribes

Of a broken mind,

Switching allegiances

Like a fickle tide forgetting the moon,

Changing our image to suit,

Gritting our teeth

In gripped identity

Held as a fist

Shaken at the world.

Are you for or against?

⁃ the what does not matter

In this politics of imagery.

Is it possible we are mistaken

In our hell-bent

Desperation to be somebody?

Could we be

Loose in all the periphery

Of our difference?

Could we see that we one in our being

And the rest is but a jumble of ideas

To wear, not for the war of it

But for the fun of it.

Where is even rightness in this?

Perhaps nowhere

But within the expanse of our boundless self

Containing nothing but the infinite.

All Of Us

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

I am the black man

And I love my skin

And the life within the body.

And yet I am the white man,

Pale as the purity of snow.

And still I am Asian.

And so too am I mixed,

With all the races blood

In lattices twisted up in the

Ages DNA, conjuring diversity,

Bringing beauty and ugliness

Time and time again.

But I too am a woman

For there is joy in that form,

As there is joy within the masculine.

And the body of a child is mine.

And sometimes I am sexless,

Indefinably between

The boarders of mapmakers

And nationality.

And I am every class and cast

There ever was.

All this I have in me.

And as I am,

So too is other,

Not one

With jurisdiction

Over emotion, attribute or worth.

Not one less than

And not one more than.

All of us

Looking upon the world

From the same different place,

Infinitely capable

And with equal potential

To be all things.

Stain Of Hatred

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

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

Solvent Self

~ distilledvoice ~ 4 Comments

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

Brothers In Colour

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

There is something
Victorian
In his whiteness,
A correctness
Disciplining the rest
So regulation
Rules in dry doctrine.

And to his eye
His black skinned brother
Is carnal opposite
To the structure
Rigid in his self
And he fears
The hot power
Of a primitive.

And thus
The black man
Is subdued
For being
The outward heart
With body filled
With blood and vigour

And the white man
Gelds himself,
Separates from his pulse,
His inner fire,
Grows cold and stiff,
And with backstroke
Of his incising knife
Flays
His collateral brother,
So in neither
Is the life found flowing,
And in both
The cut
Equally deep.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

In The Protectorate Of The White Adult

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

The soldier wears his face
Expressionless; his body
The unimpassioned tool
Of a government, his self
Hidden deep, but watching
Immobile, as the rolling news
Archives refugees in their movement.

White faces wear white masks
While the multitude are naked.
If you could see the lips speak
Behind the West’s veil,
You’d hear these words:
We don’t want your disease

Or your brown, unwashed skin
Unless sanitised in servitude:
A cocktail offered by a waiter
On a faraway beach –
Given to the money flushed king,
Sweating in the midday heat.

Don’t you know:
Migration is a one way valve
And impoverishment a birthright.
Remain in your grubby seat
For you are the brown child
In the white adult’s protectorate.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

Youff Of Oxford

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

i is liack
d rapper
in d cloves,
slouchin offa me,
all shadey, liack,
coz
i is under ground
in me finkin

coz, i got dat
fuz
of d weed
on me, liack
and
me liack d gangster
doin d deals
on d street
and d back street, rite

but i as this secret, rite
i is from d middle class
ma mom
she liack,
is whiat
and munches dem olives
and liack go down
waitrose, and liack, votes
an all dat

but don’t tell no one, rite
coz we tite,
rite.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

For The Racists

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Worse than hatred;
The blanking hand
Demises those blanked

And withheld acknowledgment
Disappears the subject of a self
As if it were a ghost
Of no magnitude or apparentcy.

A crime to be blanked
And yet also,
Crime in the one who blanks,
For the racist cauterises his own
Wholesome self in the violence
Of his denying

And lies as injured as his victim
In the victimhood of his division:
No longer seeing all the beautiful
Faces who are the whole of him.
Half his heart he disowns and cuts
From his being, settling in to the
Fraction of the self remaining,
So colourless and drained,
And denied of life’s real meaning

In the face of otherness rejected.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015