thought

Political Correctness

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere in it
There is a buried truth
But we
Who blunder through
Find our free words
Banned and restricted,
A gag
Stuffed in the mouth
As if the messenger words
Were the evil
Rather than sentiment
Expressed
Or held in prohibition’s worse
And inward secrecy.

There is much merit
In an ideal
But not one forced,
And not one
Policed by strong arm law
Of uncertain thought
In stance
And put upon the voice,
That makes us speak
With a stuttery tongue,
Unsure of what can
And can’t be said.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

Slack Faced Thought

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

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

Religion Of War

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

 

If religion were expunged
Our ripe blood hearts
And fanatical brains
Would conjure
The sword wet
Dichotomy
Of feuding
Once more
And once again,
And we’d war
For sake of differing
And march
Beneath some other
Banner, flag
Or hot thought
Incendiary
In its desire
To strike out
And baptise
New recruits
In the endless
Cycle of violence.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice

Glass Cage

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

The heart
Wrapped
In the glass cage,

Separate
From the body,
Separate from the world,

Isolated
From synapse touch,
From neurone being:

Yet still
The mind watches
From behind the glass,

Seeing everything,
Un-blinkered,
Unblinking.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

Aggressive Projection

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

The beast is muzzled
And drooling
And straining at the lead
As if its owner’s
Distrustful eyes
And heavy
Auric clouds
Swirling
In dark stars
Of circumference hatred,
Transfuse
Umbilical
And fill the dog
With lust for blood
And teeth sharp
In every direction.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

The Way We Behave

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

As if
The mind
Were idle fascination,
Full of dreams,
Full of inconsiquencial
Speculation
And non-participation
In the formation
Of the physical world.

As if
Our behaviour
Were cut loose,
Let loose
Unrestricted,
To roam free
Upon the earth
Without ownership
To count
The scores
Of futures conceived.

As if
We were vagrants
Who’s vagrant belief
Were not owned
In the body
But put out
To all visible peers
In blames
Savage hand
And life’s
Absent redundancy.

As if
The mind
Were not
Conceiving machine,
Coating every idea
In touchable cloak,
Transmuting
Idea’s ethereal stream
From unseen secret
To the solid matter
Of the corporeal.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

Stiff And Staid

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes
I reach for the beautiful pen
Wanting
Loops
And graceful turns
Of poetry
To please the page

But find
My fingers fat as sausages
And the pen,
A cactus.
And my heart
Pumping sand
Through the plaque
Congealed
Narrowness
Of my veins

And so I write
The wrongness
So it might
Shift
From staid
And stillness
To the curves
Of energy flow,
The hopeful pen
Smooth on inky magic,
And once again imprinted

With tenderness untroubled.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

The Belief Feedback Loop

~ distilledvoice ~ Leave a comment

Out of the mouth
Via the air
To the ears.
Imagination plays its part
In conception
Of ideas,
Of how
And why.
And like that
The view point
Expands,
Resembles a fact
Becomes a bit like a truth,
Ever Growing
In to something like
The real thing.
And then
Once cooked,
Once fiddled,
Once deceived
It spews out dogmatic
And unrestrained,
Exits
As it is born,
The truth formed,
The truth made,
The fact ejected

Out of the mouth….

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015