All Of Us

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

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

For The Racists

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