Marginalia

In my dream I am lawless

A teenager loose in the night

Tagging, thieving or both

Clubs spilling the last partiers into the street

I climb onto my longboard lying flat

Skeleton style, like in the Winter Olympics

My course a cobbled rainslicked street

Ahead two women are walking

One short, one tall

The tall one is Florence Welch

Dressed in white fur, arctic fox or ermine like some Nordic goddess

She hears the clatter of my wheels

Half turns, reaching out a hand

Which I grab briefly to propel myself to greater speed

Thanks ladies, I cry as I fly past them

Wheels chattering on the glistening roadway

I gain speed

But not enough velocity to achieve maximum maneuverability

Headlights overtake me from behind

I am too far into the centre of the lane

I can’t move to the edge

I have forgotten to live in the margins

It gets brighter

Before it ends

Abruptly

 

 

David Trudel  © 2013

 

 

Constant

It isn’t anything personal

Or even able to be possessed

It isn’t something that’s yours or mine

Anymore than the air we breathe is

We need it constantly

But it can only be shared and released

Never hoarded

We can never take it away or shut it down

Even if we pretend we can

Our hearts might break but it never will

It abides

And flows ceaselessly like a great river

That sometimes we’re lucky enough to swim in

Or drink from

And the best we can hope for

Is that through each other we find a door

To enter into this state called love

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

Alone

We are all alone

Unique, in our perceptions

Which live inside our minds

We can never really share the intensity or depth of colours

In rainbows that arc across each others sky

Even if we agree on names for what they are

 

It’s been said that in ancient Greece

There was no word for green

Yellow was yellow and blue was blue

There was never any need to hold them up to each other

They managed to build a civilization

Without a word and a concept we take for granted

Perhaps we should be envious

 

Really, colour is just a clever way for our brains

To display the electro-magnetic spectrum

That radiates from everything

Until we slip under the covers with dark energy

Playing footsie with the inverse of brilliance

Getting primal in the dark

Finding spaces inside spaces

Slippery spaces

That curl over and under

Until you just have to grab on somewhere and push

Frictioning a fractioned feeling into being

Which can only be described and never shared

Beyond the boundaries

Of our imaginations

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

Posted

Wrapped in an envelope that thickens and thins

Fractured thoughts slide unlettered

With limitless potential

But lacking the certainty of conviction

Slippery and elusive as dream fragments

That seemed almost tangible at dawn

Before dissolving into the unremembered compost

Within this skin

Stamped with life’s toll and addressed to fate

Dancing through a series of brilliant non sequiturs

Waiting to be received, opened

And read by an adept

Fluent in the tongue of impossible ambiguity

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

Fantasy

Today I won’t let my fantasies run wild

I won’t think about your open-toed sandals

Or unslipping them and raising your foot to my mouth

To kiss your high-arched instep while fondling your toes

I refuse to think about your hand reaching out to the back of my head

And pulling me close

Into the best kiss I’ve ever tasted

I won’t dream about unbuttoning your blouse

Or slipping off your bra so that I can run my tongue

First this way then that around the velvet smoothness of your aureoles

While your nipples rise to attention, which I give them

I won’t imagine my hand rubbing your crotch through your jeans

Or your hand pressing down on mine

Worrying that you want to stop my naughtiness

Until you start applying your own intentional pressure

Teaching me your rhythms and tipping points

I won’t dream about belts unbuckled and the sweet over the hip slide

Pants pooling on the floor

I won’t visualize your panties already darkly wet

Or skin shimmering with the perspiration of hot pleasure

I don’t think labial lapping thoughts today

Or wonder about the sensitivity of your clitoris to my fingers and tongue

This isn’t the day to breathe your smells into being

Or to taste you on my lips

This is a day to pull back from fantasies

To a place where smiles are just smiles and not an invitation

 

 

David Trudel    ©  2013

 

 

Shrouded and Cloaked

This is the kind of day

Shrouded and cloaked in clouds and showers

A day with no exclamation marks

This is the kind of day when he would have called

To share a groaner of a pun

Match calendars for lunch

Or just to see if I was still alive

Which of course he isn’t

Some ghosts linger longer than others

I’ve had my share of losses over a lifetime

Sometimes it isn’t the pain of the loss as much

As it’s empathy with the bereaved

Like the time a classmate’s younger brother

Was struck down in a traffic accident

I will always be haunted by the memory of his mother’s eyes

Noticed obliquely a few months later when I was over at their house

Her eyes shiny as polished chrome but full of grief’s infinity

Some ghosts seem bound to places

Where they passed or where we shared a moment

Or maybe a song will shuffle its way into a tendril

Of sweet remembrance

A recollection of spectral intensity

This is the kind of day

When spirits walk beside me

Shrouded and cloaked

In clouds and showers

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

Shavings

Dream shavings lie scattered on my pillow

Whittled to slivers of sparkle and shade

Curled up and disappearing into daylight

Brushed together into a handful of nonsense

Picasso’d deconstructions of unreality

Torn into scraps and gathered up

To be collaged into fragment fantasies

Other underworldly passages into dark divinity

Soul windows and secret passageways

That defy logic and reason naturally

With the assuredness of dreams

 

 

 

David Trudel    ©  2013

 

 

Soliloquies

In my mind I plan soliloquies

For potential situations that never quite arise

Inside my head these words resound

Quite brilliantly, as you should know

But it turns out my vision of the future sucks

I build constructs of things that never happen

Populate them with conversations that pop and spark

But in the event, it’s dark

So these words dissolve into the cesspool of my rejections

Providing nothing more than compost

For a future that seems to be impossible

But I keep on thinking

Sometimes dreaming

Of the words I’d like to say to you

Soliloquies and sonnets

Brilliant thoughts and hopeful longings

I dream them through

To the end of true

Waiting for an answer

That isn’t an echo

 

 

David Trudel  ©  2013

 

 

Journey – A Triptych

1.    North

Traumatized and demoralized

I fled into the north

Heading to Dawson City to visit Tony’s sister

We had a few hundred dollars and a bag of weed

Journeying in my orange VW Thing

As we drove further north

The car became a curiosity, a rare thing indeed

Pulling conversations from the taciturn

As we watched gasoline prices exceed our imaginations

 

One night, while there still was night

On the Stewart Cassiar highway

We came around a bend and were stopped by a wall of gravel

That seemed impossibly high and wide

So we began to prepare for a long wait

Got out the Stoned Wheat Thins

Some cheese and a summer sausage

Figuring it was time for sustenance

When the wall was Moses’d

It parted

Bright lights shone cosmically

 

A D12 dozer was our rod and our staff

Parting the chaos of gravel mounds

With the smooth dexterity of a pastry chef

We followed

Looking more than a little ridiculous to grimy goliaths

Who you just knew only drove trucks

American ones

And probably didn’t eat Stoned anything

 

We were ejected into the blackness of beyond

Heading straight up the map

Through mountains of gravel

Northward we travelled in unhindered light

To a log cabin on the banks of the Klondike

The driveway was twenty miles long

Shared with wolverines and moose

And if it took time to get there

It was a place to feel at home

Secure in the knowledge that door to door salesmen

Would never bother to knock

 

We walked the wooden sidewalks of Dawson City

Avoiding the tourist trappings of Diamond Tooth Gerties

We drank sudsy drafts at backstreet bars

With wild eyed seekers

Big city retreaters

One day we impossibly piled a dozen new friends into the car

Drove to the Midnight Dome

Where we shared the last few joints and a pint of rye

Surveying the small outpost in relentless wild

Sensing possibilities beyond the horizon

 

So we made some possibles happen

Drove the Dempster to Eagle Pass

Where a full moon rose over our rough campsite

Then made way for the northern lights

Dancing starbright with the grace of a Bolshoi ballerina

We whistled them closer until we were covered in magic

Looking out across the arctic circle to the top of the world

 

We danced across the tundra

Past the dwindling line of pecker poles

Hopping from hippy head to hippy head

Forded icy rivers that ran with the speed of the chased

Rubbed shoulders with grizzlies and the grizzled

Whose independence was declared through the intensity of the gaze

 

As the summer wore on forest fires raged

Until the plumes crept over the next ridge

And choppers buzzed our lonely cabin

So we walked a few hundred yards up the twenty-mile driveway

Discovered a command centre

Staging ground for firefighters who could always use help

So we signed up and up we went

Commuting to the smoke where we strapped piss pumps to our backs

Grabbed shovels and watched as timbers candled

Hoping for the wind to shift in time for lunch

Since we had never eaten as well as in that rough camp

Or gotten quite so dirty

Blacker than a Welsh coalminer

Soot that found its way through clothes to every inch of untanned skin

To be scrubbed the next week at the metered shower in town

Since the woodstove and hauled Klondike water only barely sluiced

The top layer leaving us a dismal gray

But we made a few bucks and beat the fire back

Flew like warriors in Bell Rangered wonder

Over undulating mysteries

To see the sea of trees saved for another season

 

A season we wouldn’t experience

But left to the iconoclasts and the lonely

Those who could drift no further

Yet could wield an axe and feed a stove

So when the leaves turned and frost arrived

We turned tail and went south

But a piece of my soul remains buried in the Klondike

Part of the motherlode of the riches of my life

 

 

2.    Alberta

 

The first challenge was to fence a quarter section

160 acres

There was a tight budget so that meant recoiling downed wire

Of the fence we were replacing

Pulling staples and hammering flat the salvageable ones

Assessing posts for rot

Turned out that the convertible Thing was a handy platform

Sledgehammer blow by sweaty blow

For driving treasured new tamarack posts securely into the ground

Which we grew intimate with

Since our lodgings turned out to be a teepee

Nestled in the rolling flat lands of northern Alberta

We worked with the last family of a hippy commune

To keep their dream flickering

As we restored the back forty fence

Learnt the rhythms of this sullen prairie

Sacrificed a glade of trees for timbers for a barn

When you peel the bark off trees with drawknives

You can smell their death

Almost an offering in the crisp autumn light

At least we’d like to think so

Then came harvest and stuking the oats

An itinerant thresher arrived like a Rube Goldberg fancy in action

Hay wagons and itches filled dawn to dusk days

Next weekend the old Ukranian farmer from up the road

Oversaw the raising of the barn

He was barely literate

But knew what needed to be done

So did the dozens of others who we’d seen at the gas station

And the diner

Or not at all

But impossibly the walls rose

Chinked into place

And if it wasn’t quite finished by Sunday evening

It was damn near quite enough as we all said

Breaking bread on long trestle tables in the yard

A few days later the vegetarian era ended abruptly

When Ralph, gentle Ralph the pig

A Charlotte’s Web kind of pig

Radiant pig

Met his doom graphically

Tony missed out on some really great meals

So he volunteered to crank the separator during dinner

Until the memory faded

One day a strange car drove up

Full of aboriginal youth

They wanted to check out the teepee

Having never been in one before

We said sure

Brought out whatever offerings we had

Booze and tokes

Which were warmly received

Reciprocated

As we shared the fire and laughter

Drank into a gentle inebriation

We learnt swear words with great delight

When one of our new friends tried to leave

Couldn’t find the door

We laughed

Then we all went outside to piss under the bright stars

Marveling at the moment

A few weeks later I was given a length of two by four

Dropped off at an intersection at some ungodly early hour

Told pay attention, they’ll be here in an hour

Make sure you turn them that way

Use the persuader

Turned out the orange Thing

Or maybe my crazed look

Was enough to turn that herd

I didn’t need to smack some bovine upside the head

Thank Christ, as I remarked

To some farmer who passed me a flask a few minutes later

We learnt the art of waking up cold

Having to build a fire with one arm quickly thrust from down filled warmth

To last night’s drunken pile of kindling which is almost not enough

But desperation is a good teacher

Living in a teepee in northern Alberta

As fall met winter

We met our match

And the prairie winds blew

 

 

3.    McMurray

 

We knew we were in trouble

When we couldn’t even get a room at the Heartbreak Hotel

Which wasn’t on lonely street

But we felt lonely enough in the construction dusty hive

By the second day we had jobs

Laying pipe in the tarry clay

A one-armed foreman aimed a ruby-eyed laser down the run

Impressing us with advanced technology

We laboured rough and hard

Drank the nights dry at the Peter Pond hotel

Driving back to camp drunk

I gambled on which of the three bridges swirling in view

Was the real one, and won that bet

When the crew was laid off a couple of weeks later

Nobody panicked

Just got new jobs

In our case working for a masonry outfit

Building a warehouse in the cold

The site was tarp swaddled

Propane heaters roared

Inside it was shirtsleeve warm

Outside the snow came down and ground froze up

We discovered frostbite

Slopped pails of cement up and down scaffolding

Going from furnace to frozen like a menopausal matron

One day as wet snow blanketed everything

I had to hold long lengths of metal trusses for the roof

Perched on a flimsy skyhold

While welders arced the other ends into place

Electrical charges raced across and up my arms

Each jolt a nail driven deep

On weekends we’d drive back to the farm

Remembering the dream of that vestigial commune

In the cold light of a short day

Where tires freeze flat and if you can start the car

The wheels go clunk, clunk, clunk for the first mile or so

In order to start cars on an unwired farm

We learnt the art of placing coffee tins with kerosene soaked rags

Under oilpans and setting them alight

Which left time for a second cup of instant coffee

Which I’d drink while looking out the window

Hoping to not see more orange than I wanted to

As winter deepened the summery convertible became even more of a joke

I’ve known warmer refrigerators in my time

There were snowdrifts on the floor that didn’t melt

Until we hit the Coast

After high-tailing it back home for Christmas

With a few hundred bucks in our jeans

And unaudited revenues of memories made

Whose interest is still compounding

Even today

 

 

David Trudel   ©  2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thoughts

These thoughts conspire to enslave me

Shackles jangling in the heated open square where we are mustered

I plead the fifth

Seek succor from the beneficence of power’s contrition

Which is withheld

So I stand freely

In fear and without fear

Compuctionless

Become neutral as Switzerland

And just as cuckoo

Marching with precision

To a dénouement of epic proportions

Waiting for the action/reaction

The moment when the chemicals collide

To create a new device

Synthesizing a new reality

Freely given

 

 

David Trudel    © 2013