The drunkard on the street
Begging with dirty fingers
Is no less worthy.
The banker mired in wealth,
Fiddling his taxes
Has access to everlasting love.
The warlord
Entrenched in violence
Could touch the eternal flame.
The everyman
Just getting on
Is a request away from energy.
The robber, the thief, the swindler,
And the police
Are equally entitled.
All are welcomed
Into the heart of love,
The sun inside, shining infinitely.
Bathe in the warm sea
Of universal light,
For it is near,
As near as your body.
You can reach for it,
Ask for it to warm your heart,
For it is as close to you
As your famished thoughts.
You can have it.
It is yours and always was,
You just turned away
For the briefest everlasting moment.
He spins his breath
In to a spell
Of enigma circling,
Like an auric cloak of twisting fog
Behind which he ducks
In the maintainence of mystery.
What dwells within the vortex
Behind the wall of half
Answered questions
And glimpses
Drawn away by the spell?
Is there a mystery within
Or only the wish of mystery
And its subtle trickery
Of the hidden man?
I invite you,
Wizard behind the spell of
Manipulated wonderment:
Step forward, naked and without the
Swirling clothes that hide your name
And deflect every question
To a riddle in a cul de sac.
Step out, Wizard.
Is not real magic,
To be visible, straight forward,
Unclothed and vivid as the thing
Unashamed and confident:
The mysterious wand set down,
The spell dispersed,
The conjuring acquitted,
The self beneath, unmasked.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
In the myth of science
there are all the beautiful stories
you could ever wish to contrive.
In the religion of science
there are the stiffly clasped
doctrines of zealots.
In the science of science
there are symbols, and arguments
over the meanings of things.
But we are still the people
as we were the people before,
hearing fragments and rumours,
pasting them in to the pastiche
of our fears, our dreams
and the myths we’ve believed.
Yet another relentless turn of the age
sees misunderstandings told,
preached as the truth,
our power deflected from self
and put to Gods of numbers
and statistics, pushed away
from the heart’s human yolk
that weeps to discern truth
from confusion’s intellectual maelstrom.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Still the dogged pioneer spirit
Owning protocol and government.
Still the époque of first footsteps
On the shore of the new world.
Still strident explorers
Followed by makeshift populous.
Still the gold-rush
For buried commodity.
Still value of money
Above the the richness of place.
Still the dampening
Of primitive voice.
Still the damaging hand
Assassinating loveliness.
*
These are the end times
Of carelessness,
The deep tectonic shift
In the solitary man,
In the mind
Of every man,
From rootless
To gia-joined:
The umbilicus revealed
In waking of earth
In the feeling body
And connection
To all that was disembodied
And heartless pushed out.
These are the end times
And times of new beginning.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
He holds the cigarette
With his lip.
As he speaks
It nods its agreement.
In his hand is a beer,
At home
Quite naturally.
An eau de vie lubricant.
In his face is a scowl,
An irritation
As if most things
Were shit
Or, he’s cool
To offer disinterest.
A shrug and a pout
In detachments shout,
Ejected from the self,
Thrown out
And projected
As the very loudest silence.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice
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
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.
I’m on the London Underground. It’s a bit stuffy. The air is friction electricity, rush and surge. The carriage is about half full, I’d say, not more. An assortment of commuters sway with the movement of the train. Screeches and clattering echo in the dark tunnels but the passengers don’t hear. Or if they do, their faces give nothing away.
Strange faces: slack and free of expression. I wonder: who are these people? I look at each one and classify them with a form of mental taxonomy but my only tools are what my mind has used before. I put my memories to their faces, paint personalities, jobs, dreams on to the canvas of their skin but find the pictures to be mine, not theirs.
I have to admit, I have nothing but the thoughts I’ve thought before. I’ve killed these slack faced people even before they’ve uttered a word or made a movement or facial expression. I’ve fitted them up, put them in boxes, labelled them with stereotypes: colours, creeds, sexes, the way they wear their clothes, their hair. Every single stranger judged. The decision as to their identity, conceived and irrevocably made so they become fabricants wearing the fictions I have projected on to the facade of my contrived world.
I wonder if they killed the slack faced me they saw? Or perhaps they did something entirely different?
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
The mind
Tantalised by terror’s
Excitement,
Rubber stamps
Every violence,
Every incident,
And brands
Every normal madness
As terrorism
Born to our physical place.
And to the runaway dream
We add our angers,
And we rage
To do something against
The foe
Clothed
And created,
The anti image
Of our own
Disassociated face:
A glad enemy
Summoned
For us to fight.
And so we go
Hot headed,
The blood
Of foes
Desperate
To be let,
Our minds coalesced
In agreement’s
Blind conditioning
To go
Triumphant
And enthusiastic
To the next
Terrible war
Of mistakes.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015
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