The Building Trade • Kevin Cadwallender
When I was 15 I left school and worked on a building site as a Floor Tiler. For most of my two years I felt like an existentialist, eventually I left after throwing a box of tiles at another tiler and hitchhiking home. The poem is part of the “Baz Uber Alles” sequence published by Dogeater Press.
Julian is an existentialist. He works on a building site
with Tom the labourer, Fred the brickie and Bob the hod carrier.
It works like this: Tom fills Bob’s hod up with bricks,
Bob carries them to Fred and Fred builds a wall.
Julian’s job is to help the bricks understand their own reality.
Tom has ham sandwiches for lunch,
Bob has cheese and Fred has egg.
Julian doesn’t have lunch as he feels this is saying ‘no’
to a society which insists on social imperatives such as lunch.
Sometimes the bricks argue with Julian saying
‘But we have the right to freedom.’
Julian smiles, ‘Man is condemned to freedom.’
‘But we are bricks’ they cry, ‘why do you oppress us?’
Some days the walls just don’t get built at all.
Julian doesn’t sleep well.
He dreams of a mass uprising of bricks,
of boundaries collapsing all over suburbia,
of Sunday morning street warfare with flymos
and hovers clashing over disputed inches of turf,
of middle-class landowners with nothing to keep
their mortgages in …
secretly,
Tom practises hod carrying
Bob practices bricklaying
and Fred is doing a night class in sociology.
Julian is an existentialist and lives outside
of the restrictions placed upon him by the
constant problem of having no self to esteem
and no self to be ‘ish’ with.
This however does not prevent his sleeping
with the gaffer’s daughter who has
a Btec in Freudian hairdressing,
which means that everytime
she cuts someone’s hair
they look like a dick.
Kevin Cadwallender has worked as Santa Claus, clown, roadie, sound engineer, actor, dancer, policeman and night porter. He has published several poetry books latest Colouring in Guernica (Red Squirrel Press) and a novel is due out this year. New and Selected poems: Dances with Vowels (Smokestack) is available to preorder via Amazon.
With Anita Govan he has recently set up Voxbox which runs the most comprehensive slams ever seen in Scotland with individual, team and youth slams as well as a prose slam and a Sotto Vox quiet slam. Held at The Mercat Bar West Maitland Street, Haymarket, Edinburgh.
