Pale Rider

The humidifier burbled away in the corner and I stamped the sticky February slush off my desert boots and onto her Chat Noir doormat. It was the oddest place for a reading, an albino’s dorm room.  I met her in Anthro and rumour had it that this enormous blancmange of a woman had the power, a peaked seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.  She settled back onto her tiny bed and peeled bits of skin off her cankle. I handed her $20 and cut the cards. Holding them nose-distance from her eyes she told me that I would die young.

Image taken from Echostains.

Lemonade

Times were getting tough, honing wit and innovation. Sighting the NYC food truck invasion coupled with peoples blind faith, lotto and their relentless quest for answers through air, inspired. The lady rode around town with a bicycle basket full of fortune cookies. She sold them for a buck a piece . It was her way of making a living in a world gone mad with taking chances, chancing a glimpse to see their future. Let’s face it, it's a lot cheaper than calling one’s own personal professional psychic as seen on TV and a hell of lot more accurate.

Image from Lawsagna.

Half-hearted

That was the year I baked her a batch of gingerbread men, each with a cinnamon heart where their real hearts would be, back when I had yet to run out of ideas for Valentine’s Day and too often had way more time than money. That was my excuse, but I can’t remember hers.
     “I’m really sorry,” she said. “I didn’t have the time to get you anything, but I did think about buying a box of kid’s valentines and addressing them all to you.”
     That’s a cute idea, I thought.
     Maybe I can use it for my next girlfriend.

Photo by Debbi Smirnoff

Snake Charmer

We were poor undergraduates so our gifts were always handmade.  Once I substituted Harrison Ford’s face for his in a pastel version of the Raiders of the Lost Ark poster. He liked the Lescaux cave paintings so I created huge canvases for him.  In return he crafted me some lovely things. Plaster figurines, jewelry, carvings. When we broke up I packed up all his efforts in a Zellers bag and returned them. He kept all my drawings. It was a wrench because his work was beautiful. Gil may have been a psychopath, but he was also an artist. Like Hitler.

Image: Los Angeles Times

Generosity or Pay to Play

I stopped inhaling your kind words long ago. Those spoken, written in gifted books or greeting cards. But every very so often the evidence resurfaces. Now numb to their loving messages. Once beautiful, to merely black ink incisions on cream colored parchment leaving only indentations. Scars, really. As though written in a foreign language, this script was given to another who no longer exists. Erased, by the violent sweep of your lacerating tongue.
     I’ve scrubbed clean most traces of you. Sometimes wearing the bestowed jewels, loosing the elaborate story of your generosity when admired. A quick “thanks” replaced that illusion.

Image by: Cec LePage

The Bad Father

My dad was okay, I guess; but I never really did see him much. He went in on the train every morning before I got up and usually came home after bedtime. He did tell me once about his office building and promised to take me there and buy me lunch in the fancy restaurant at the top for my birthday, but he never did. And you know what? I thought those explosions were really cool, but one of the big kids at recess said to shut up, and I told him to shut up because my father was dead.
Frame grab from this forbidden trailer.

Gentrify This

In the Stone Age when we bought our crumbling houses Roncesvalles was cozily plebey with nary a douchie barbeque nor Thuet baguette to be had. But things change. Except Aris Place. The Strollertariat may go there for their ironic brunches, but this place belongs to that dying breed of Torontonian: The Old and Trashy White Guy. These Spongemonsters soak up beer and unabashedly order fries and gravy ’cause that’s what they ate when the Leafs were winning, eh?
     They are the forgotten souls who limped out of Mimico for greener pastures. But at least their heads aren’t up their arses.

Photo by Roy Schulze

Forgotten Women

Apple shopping today I spied the shadow of a women I once knew, sitting on a Siamese water pipe. Head down, yellow cap sat snug hiding her eyes. Gray coarse hair shot from it, brushing stooped shoulders. She had aged and morphed into an old man sporting hip hop garb. Sitting there sun drenched in a shrouded sadness. Lost was the smile that defined her being. Looping back I thought I’d say hello, knowing she’d remember me. The pipe resumed its purpose, static. She had vanished, pouf, appearing and disappearing just like the entourage who had left her behind.

Image by: Cec LePage

New Year’s 1989

I had enjoyed meeting her friends in Kingston, until she told me how the father had once been jailed when their croupy baby had become too much to bear. I had enjoyed New Year’s Eve in Ottawa catching up with Peter, until she told me of the pass he’d made under the table during the salmon mousse. I’d even enjoyed the drizzle on Parliament Hill and shouting bonne année at midnight, until later that night when it had all come back on me, alone in the bathroom, then on the long drive home, nursing Peptol Bismol straight from the bottle.

Photo from Simply Recipes.

Cry Baby

I’ve always been a crier. A loud, gavalte, snot-filled blubberer. Last summer, I wailed and held my stomach for twelve hours during the gut-wrenching coach ride back from Folkestone to Winchester. The lure of cheap Cadburys and the lull of incessant English chirping did little to relieve the hell of motion sickness, a susceptibility forged as an unbelted toddler roaming the backseat of a smoke-filled and suspension-challenged Desoto. Nobody came near me on that bus. No offers of tea or tissues. It could have been because I was the only French-speaker on the Battlefield Tour, but I don’t think so.

The Inner Asp

Tears? Toxic waste exposed, pouring tempestuously, was the harbinger of tranquil felt today. Letting the flood gates release over dinner, salty drops seasoned her plate as she ate and relived the anguish harbored and fed. Vulnerable bubbles bled, willynilly. The turbulence, that had drenched her bed sheets, lay dormant in little bits of glistening crystals, dark clouds, tissues, grief dried up. Last nights woes can now be collected and flushed away. Life is interesting. When all seems lost, tears expose their hiding place as they unfold and roll over flesh swabbing up sorrow that can later be discarded so easily.

Image by: Cec LePage

I Wandered Until Dawn

Since they were seven years old, director Michael Apted has been chronicling the lives of fourteen disparate souls in a series of films together regarded by many as the greatest documentary ever made. He releases these little socio-economic masterpieces every seven years, and it just so happened that 28 Up was to play at the Bloor Cinema on my 28th birthday, a film in which everyone would be exactly the same age as me—and who wouldn’t want to see something like that? Except perhaps my girlfriend, who had already made plans with her friends. So, I watched it alone.

By August, then, the papers announced that the upcoming lunar eclipse would be the best for the next forty years. But what they didn’t mention was that my buddy, Tim, had a house on a hill facing south and that my girlfriend was already going out somewhere else and that Tim’s sister-in-law would show up all drunk and sexy from her office baseball game, and that then, come the great blackout in April and my dark romp downtown, I would finally figure out that I had never had so much fun with my girlfriend as I was having without her.

December 21, 2010

It was too cold to stand outside so Dan and I watched through the garden door. The moon was so high that to view it we had to lay on our backs and shoulder to shoulder like boxed toy soldiers, looking up. I told him how his Pépé tinted a pane of glass with candle smoke so that I could safely witness a solar eclipse. Together we watched until the blood moon covered all but a tiny fingernail’s worth of light. My son’s reward was a shooting star at 3 am; mine came when he agreed to keep me company.

Image: Heribert Proepper

Night Crawler

Meandering Marla leaves me, offering congratulations to the celebrated girl at the New Museum. I take to the outdoor space, filling lungs with crisp evening air, under a full on starry night, glimmering. Highlighted above are Venus and Jupiter in full regalia smiling down at me. A man appears from nowhere, lost his friend, says he. I reply “Me too, mine’s MIA amongst the black cladded crowd.” He’s waxing poetic celestials, marvelling over darkened sky. Agreeing it’s a rare NYC moment, Juan Carlos then apprehends my ass as his own rare Manhattan opportunity. “Just another night crawler on earth.” B-bye!

Image: Cec Lepage

Gunwale Bobbing

She liked it on top—which once would have suited me fine, except that, from there, she’d invariably start rocking with an earnestness I now never failed to find just disconcerting enough to throw me off the moment and back to the night we actually did try it out on the lake in her father’s canoe, with me on top that time, bathing suit down to my ankles, knees rubbed raw on the wet fibreglass, holding tight to the gunwales but mostly just trying to keep my butt low enough as the boat teetered on the edge of capsizing.
     Thwarted.

Image adapted from the cover of this 1995 album.

Breathless

It was a simple black and white self-portrait, taken for an undergraduate photography course, and it was beautiful. Dolores floated atop the water, the small ripples creating wobbly rings of light over her dark swimsuit, a tell-tale flash cord snaking around her outstretched arm. Her hair a blonde jellyfish and her eyelashes clumped in threes. No pool for me, I tried it in my bathtub, head half-in-half-out of the water. Deaf-muted. This unsettling amniotic rhythm of breathing and heart beat translated into a moment of rebirth for my friend, but for me, I felt like I was being buried alive.

Image from Alegri Photos.

ABreast

Darling.

A note to you. The sun is shining bright. Sitting here, looking to the ocean so close,
the absolute end of it’s frothy crest tickle my toes.
Yes, titillate, trickling breaths of the former life back into me.
Yes, it’s lapping my body, the ebb and flow, heal.
Yes the part of me that is gone, eradicated, goes to the ocean
and what comes forward is, not a lack but renewed strength.

This may sound sophomoric, perhaps, perhaps it does.
But the their, there, in the horizon has living to be done.
I shall do it with one.

Yours,



Sketch by Cec Lepage, NYC

We all Scream for Ice Cream

There’s a new ice cream man in our neighbourhood. He has the same style of truck and presumably sells the same sort of soft ice cream as Mr. Marigoudakis, our resident ice cream man, but this interloper will never be successful. Not only because he is infringing on our guy’s turf, but because he plays the creepiest music. Mr. M’s tune is upbeat and happy, but this new one is slow and played in a minor key. Picture an ice cream cone dangling by its neck and sad, nihilistic German children forced to eat it and you get the idea.

Image taken from the TORONTOist.

Meet the Colemans

People raised in a trailer park in the middle of Essex County don’t camp. But try telling that to my outdoorsy friends, who like polar-fleeced Jehovah’s Witnesses, wax rapturously over places with uncomfortable and worrisome names like Killbear and Grundy. They’re good-hearted souls and apart from their canoe obsession have no other debilitating personality flaws. Once they set up a tent for me, my son and our two dogs. Dan escaped to the Echo. By the third night I’d resigned myself to fitful slumber, alternatively lulled and asphyxiated by the cry of the loon and Siko’s incessant and robust farting.

Image: Trip Advisor

Pine

The wood that stocks the fireplace is the same as built the walls. Does one tremble for the other’s fate? The walls stand staunch, chinks filled, timbers set, saw ends smoothed, cabinet doors pierced through with china knobs. They do not tremble; they cannot.
     The smoke from the firewood whispers out over grey and emerald grasses, between the fraying birches, through the spider’s nets to its swaying erstwhile sisters. Particles settle onto bark, glide into resin, drip a slow ecstatic drip to the raven's raucous call. They fall with young cones into leaf mould; they pine for their varnished brethren indoors.

Image: Trip Advisor.
Written in Antigonish; in memory of E. Bischoping.
Posted to dVerse Poets.