scenes from a life - rocky mtn hi

ep 1 - rocky mtn hi



ep 2 - softcore



ep 3 - jeremiah johnson



ep 4 - arches

Reasons For Living - November 2014

Plays
Our Lady of Kibeho - Katori Hall
The Seagull - Bedlam Theatre
Straight White Men - The Public Theater

Movies
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues - Adam McKay 
Mutual Appreciation - Andrew Bujalski
Boyhood - Richard Linklater
Eyes Wide Shut - Stanley Kubrick
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Julian Schnabel
Slacker - Richard Linklater

Novels
Madame Bovary - Gustav Flaubert
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Poetry
What Narcissism Mean to Me - Tony Hoagland

Prose
Jonathan Lethem essays
The Job - William S. Burroughs
Big Two-Hearted River - Ernest Hemingway

Burrito Bowl

I skip America this time, Arrive

like a shuffled

ear

I can barely listen to an entire song anymore.

I can barely fall in love for longer than it takes

for the subway doors to close anymore.

I skip this thought and go

on to the next.

I’m searching for something

And I usually I find it

And I must find it again

And I must find it again

And I must find it again.

I listen to your voice on the plane

A recording I’d taken on my phone.

We won’t talk about that.

Arid California bashed with sea,

Palms imported from Araby.

Screenplays zilched in sunstroked Macbooks.

Starlets and tachycardia in the baked potato roads.

The day is jewelish, the traffic bewitches.

A cop car drives by, scalped of lights,

Black Xs over the badges on its doors,

And I think I’m Ice Cube in Boyz in the Hood,

Denzel in Malcolm X.

(L.A.: even the cars are sad and in costume.)

Kaleidoscopic graffiti cartwheels the underpass,

Lucille Ball in a falling Hall of Mirrors.

Plaster Versailles’ collapse, seguing epochs.

I don’t move that fast,

caught in the sleeperhold

of my brother’s apartment I’m falling

into the matinee dream of a nap...

I take the Metro, L.A.’s tropical tramway,

Palm tree’d columns holding up Hollywood Blvd.,

To Amoeba and find Songlines and War of Art

on the dollar racks, my only place in society.

I’m a discount Bourgeoisie: lunch specials and cups for water,

Library cards and dollar stores,

Medicaid, unpaid taxes, Earned Income Credit.

I used to be an actor trapped in his headshot

Now I sleep in the grass and I read.

I eat eggs I eat pad thai I eat a burrito bowl

Guacamole, chicken, rice and beans.

Life, I’m no longer listening to you

This is not a collaboration

I’m going to do what I want

Even if it kills me.

I’ll pass on your bounties of cooled wisdom

Sitting in every open window

like pies nobody wants.

I’d rather read Apollinaire’s unstitched warwound,

His thin slit mouth sprouting blood.

I’d rather learn from a lazy paperback

How other men have made /my mistakes before me/

I am not inventing new ones/They suffered for them/

Like I will suffer/And that suffering can be

composted/with words.

I get about 10 minutes of good reading in a day

If I’m lucky. People tell me my mind is tired I don’t think so

REASONS FOR LIVING - October 2014

Poetry
Robert Lowell - The Dolphin
Eileen Myles, Adam Zagawjewski, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca

Movies
Boogie Nights - P.T. Anderson
Walden: diaries, notes, sketches - Jonas Mekas
Grizzly Man - Werner Herzog
Rescue Dawn

Novels
Running Dog - Don Delillo

Plays
Train Story - Adam Rapp

scenes from a life - sept 21 - extra life

scenes from a life - sept 20 - born to lose

scenes from a life - sept 23 - socks

scenes from a life - friday - aug 15

best viewed in hd wearing headphones

REASONS FOR LIVING - September 2014

Poetry
Destroyer and Preserver - Matthew Rohrer
West Running Brook - Robert Frost
The Late Parade - Adam Fitzgerald

Plays
Krapp's Last Tape -Samuel Beckett

Movies
La Collectionneuse - Eric Rohmer
Slacker - Richard Linklater

Reasons For Living - August 2014

Movies
Lord of War - Andrew Niccol
It's Impossible to Learn How to Plow By Reading Books (Partial)- Richard Linklater
Synecdoche, New York - Charlie Kaufman
Deux Hommes dans Manhattan - Jean-Pierre Melville
Dazed and Confused - Richard Linklater

Plays
Balladeers Play To The Moon - Matthew Vitticore, Writer - Joe's Pub
Othello - Shakespeare in the Parking Lot - Hamilton Clancy
Me, Myself and I
Seascape - Edward Albee

Novels
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
Tonio Kroger - Thomas Mann

A Video of a Video of Me Reading My Poem "I Don't Want To"

Narcoleptic Effulgence

Aug 12 - Road Rash

Aug 12

Super Moon

Antietam

Smoke stones open to the flame of a narrow gun,
Cried eyes closing in the blast of a falling sun,
Antietam needles bristle in the step of a racoon's paw,
Fading graying rustle, the last of the uniform's law.
Determined bullets tire, dragged down by gravity's snare.
Cities pyred entire, lit at the general's declare.
They fell, they fall, they fall again,
Salted with lottery's rain.
I kneel, I call, I call again
Lock the blood back in the stone again.

Reasons for Living - July 2014

Plays
American Buffalo - David Mamet
Melancholy Play, Eurydice - Sarah Ruhl
The Zoo Story - Edward Albee
King Lear - Public Theater, Starring John Lithgow
Movies
Wayne's World - Penelope Spheeris, Dir. 
A Master Builder - Jonathan Demme, Dir.
Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
Phil Spector - David Mamet, Dir.
TV Shows
Dexter
Prose
Essays - Jean Baudrillard
Poetry
The Religion of My Time - Pier Paolo Pasolini
Comix
Undeleted Scenes (selections)- Jeffrey Brown
Tunes
Lil Wayne, Three 6 Mafia, John Denver, Bob Dylan

Evicted

Sitting at the window of the Luck Brothers Coffee Shop
on First Avenue in Grandview Heights, Ohio
in the pleasure of absent friends
I am remembering my earliest day

warm in the yellow sun
sitting on our yellow porch
at my plastic yellow picnic table
my brother, my mother and me
eating our waffles with butter and syrup
before she has to go off to work
my dad spitting yellow puke into the toilet
I climb into her arms      she seems endless as a tree
her limbs offering me      to their own shade

she lives down the alley now with Dave and Max
(I had to get out of there for a few hours)
on the way I passed the old yellow house
newly clad in blue siding
except for the kitchen
it's old wood scorched black
from an oven fire. The siding seemed like armor,
indiscriminate, its walls working both ways:
a fire, sneaking inside, unable to find its way out
eats up everything within

Robert J Robert's yellow and black FOR RENT sign
was out front, familiar to us from the time
they moved all our furniture out into the yard
not long after mom left.
It seemed slightly like magic, our house turned
inside out, rooms undressed of their walls,
couch, tv, coffee table, desk, big wheel, plates, photo
albums, guitar, wurlitzer, clothes,
dresser, records, disney tapes, my brother
and I's bunkbeds, unhitched from each other,
arranged on a carpet of yellow crabgrass

my little yellow picnic table
thrown out on the lawn
hosting its feast
with no guests

Reasons for Living - June 2014

Prose
Travels in New England - Spalding Gray
Lucinella - Lore Segal

Plays
The Killer - Eugene Ionesco - Theatre for a New Audience feat. Michael Shannon

Dudefest '98

Dongs and dongers
Dongs by the dong
Yardage of meaty dick
slappin' the inside of thighs
flappin', shying away, nuts swinging like church bells
98 dudes lined up on a stage
in Cancun on Spring Break
Dongs on display, a white coat of sunblock painted on their snouts
Dudes very careful, applying, carefully, Hawaiian Tropic Suntan Oil to their pecks, their gluts, their quads
Dudes stilted by the heavy cable of their muscles, their profound muscles,
their big, exploding muscles and little dongs wrinkled like almonds below

A gentle ocean breeze takes a swipe at their nut hairs, frizzy, blonde, nearly invisible in the sun
The blonde chick comes onstage  98 men circle around her, in fear
She covers herself in honey
Dongs sprout loving
Her hair drips like honey from a comb
in a TV commercial for breakfast cereal
The honey sticks to her breasts
She batters the air with her ass her flesh swings
196 eyes hide behind sunglasses
98 dongs elongate to get a closer look

Poem I Could've Written When I Was 15

The sweet few minutes before school
Crunchberries and Darkwing Duck
I stick my head under the shower to tame my hair
and we leave at the last possible second

trash night

a choir of ambulances sings
me from my sleep

I am helplessly back in nyc
sty of shining glass
thirty centuries crammed into sleaze monuments
hard stone involuntary trees flowers rescinded
misdeeds loom headlights of tomorrow's moments
bearing down the future's flacid eyes
in the night of profound depth
this valley exploding in darkness
the little blossoming candle of
the megalopolis

it's not that I am lazy
it's just that I am scared
and lazy and that's why
the night awoke me
with the heat of its blasting moon
its babbling carhorns
the night a crypt the earth a flying tomb
basilicas of smut leapt from every streetcorner
manhattan gleeful with money
vituperative lights crackling from its marquee
I pull my curtain tight
against the hot breath of city light
columns of trash heaving slowly
on the breast of the lamb
windows guzzle darkness
jigsaw thoughts piece themselves
I will come out of this tunnel 
with corrected ambition
born from ultimate murk I streak
like burnt rubber you have your trees
and I have mine
and don't they all look the same anyway
the galaxy paces reinvented oceanic clock
boys and boys fall to the sidewalk
this night they must be reborn
the amniotic darkness construes me
into dancing form of smoke
a great creek falls on my head
subsumed in turpentine squalor
tomorrow that romantic aversion
the knees will press into our god
soil their proper pew
scuff marks culminate
in a utopian bastion of sound
sneakers squealing myriad
across the shiny gymnasium floor

flowers sting the french bulldog's eyes
she bites their leaves she likes the taste
strawberry potato leaves mint
in the chasm of night a soul is being prepared
we the ingredients mixing the future
I am half a recipe
let me carry my starving self nearer thee

my stubborn insistence on remaining who
I was
passes
like a stone
I give
myself
up

to you

and you

and you

and everybody

renegade musings prevent me from mattering much
smatterings of partially informed skepticism
my solidarity campaign with vanished torches
       lit and held by search party sent
       to recover the chanting stream
       that gave itself to the holographic pioneers

these pages lift no one but me
I the advice column I answer letters
I've written to myself my main task
is to hold myself back

batlaughter scratches the sky
strange punctuation sleep grows
over me like the mended sore of a grave
a wound sutured with ignorant death

maelstrom surfed
on a wooden door ripped
from its hinges

flashlight
eaten by limitless dark

flashlight
eaten by limitless illumination

The Older Years Age

My older years age
The receipt falls, yellowed, from a book bought just last year
The lost memories of young years
they stay young
in rerun, that same blonde boy
living them
That young me who I admire from this far post
of thirty years
The young me is young even in memory
He is not me
He used to be
He still is who he was, dropping his popsicle onto the backporch
and it being overrun by ants
I lived him for brief seconds. They still are young
These older years age...

The moon looks young for her age
casting her long milky leg on the smooth water
of Buckeye Lake
the same lake for the nearly 30 years I've been coming
My Uncle Pat is catching catfish and I am 3 years old
and Uncle Paul and dead Aunt Carol are reading the paper and I am 14
Water is the oldest thing around
it tastes like youth
for every one of its 5000 drinks

I push farther into the new millenia
The new crystles shoot through the pavement on Astor Place
They weren't here
when I got here
My older self, brother of the weathered tenement
passes through the glitzy facades built over
the old stoops
remembering St. Marks Place crusted in snow
slipping into St. Dymphnas' Tavern
beneath the strung Christmas lights
I am still 24 years old
every time I pass
drinking that frothy beer on New Years' Eve
and my friend Anna
is dislocating her knee in Luca Bar across the street
dancing and mopping closing the place down
Most of my life is behind me

I don't know how to go back
to being young
I have seen what I have seen
I have worked hard to learn things that I'd have been better off
not knowing
I am a tree with a calloused hide of rings
The years are shields thickened
against the blows of maturation
My older years age
Every day a newborn
Every day reborn
the same man
another day along

Reasons for Living - May 2014

Plays
Manhattan Repertory Theatre's Spring One-Acts

Poetry
Robert Duncan

TV Shows
Mad Men

Novels
Big Sur - Jack Kerouac
Ulysses - James Joyce

Movies
Escape From L.A. - John Carpenter, dir.
Certified Copy - Abbas Kiarostami, dir.
Pootie Tang* - Louis CK, dir.
Tree of Life* - Terence Malick , dir.

Prose
Gary Snyder essays
Marshall Mcluhan, Joseph Campbell, Robert Anton Wilson, Stuart Gilbert on James Joyce

*partial

there's a poem here somewhere

there's a poem here somewhere
in this room
in the air
snaking its way through
the soul music
the cigarette smoke

there's a poem around here somewhere
about her
it's gonna put back that piece she took
I can feel it trying to hide
like something lost
that wants to be found
but wants to play a little game with you first

there's a poem somewhere around here
this Sunday afternoon the blue sky wide-open
like a wound
I'll write and I'll write
I won't find it

Reasons for Living - April 2014

Plays
The Day Room - Don Delillo
4000 Miles - Amy Herzog
Dead City - Sheila Callaghan
King Lear - TFANA, Arin Arbus, dir. feat. Michael Pennington as Lear
Body Awareness - Annie Baker

Poetry
W.S. Merwin Translations
Hymn to Life, The Morning of the Poem, A Few Days - James Schuyler
Holy Sonnets, Divine Meditations - John Donne
Song of the Open Road, Calamus, Salut Au Monde!, Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, As I Ebb'd With the Ocean of Life - Walt Whitman
Mayakovsky poems

TV Shows
Silicon Valley - Premiere
Mad Men

Novels
Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness in the West - Cormac McCarthy
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P - Adelle Waldman

Movies
Inside Llewyn Davis
Duck Soup

Prose
Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges
Wendell Berry essays

ASTRONOMIA: A Failed Lullaby

A NOTE ON THE STYLE
It seems important that this is written in a kind of pseudo-verse.

It’s poetry for poetry’s sake, quite possibly the most egregious thing one can write, but in an age where nobody else seems to be doing anything for poetry’s sake, I think it’s okay for poetry to start working for it’s own behalf.

The action should be played like community theatre Shakespeare, Huge swings at the big emotions and themes, teenage breathing and desperately crinkled brows. Arch pronunciations, unnecessary British accents and o’er-brimming hearts may be employed as you see fit. The syllables should be huffed and puffed at full-sail, packed with emotion.

Above all the language should be enjoyed. Whether chewed, savored, spat or relished, the syllables should all be morsels of a dish

Costume should be whatever style is contemporaneous to the date of production, mixed with that of antiquity, a la a director’s attempt to reimagine or “update” Shakespeare. For instance, if a production had been done in the 80s it may have been costumed in a Madonna meets Malvolio style. One done circa the date of writing might be dressed Hipster-bethan (Hipster-Elizabethan). If possible, the costumes should be cheap and ill-fitting, purchased from thrift stores or whatever shops offer pale knock-offs of the current trends. Bedsheet togas pulled back with tacky brooches might hit the spot.

It takes place on a modern rooftop, but it really takes place anywhere there’s a wide-open space and a confusion of stars.

Two Lovers. Young. In each other’s arms.

SHE

Tell me a story.

HE

     About what?

SHE

Read it from the stars. Cable new constellations

From these dead bulbs of expired season.

HE

I know not the speculations of the ancients

Nor own facility for new invention.

SHE

Sing seedling legends flourishing

From murky garden night,

And equal joy will I disperse

To pay the tale’s delight.

HE

Like crystals in snow’s newborn visage,

There was twinkling, baby light

peeping from newborn eyes

upon a world well-known through

past incarnations. The pointed light froze,

Growth stunted by some early trauma,

breaking back upon its young path.

Forth and aft it heaved, as if to dislodge.

He tries to kiss.

She moves.

He tries to kiss.

She moves.

He tries to kiss.

She moves.

SHE

No no no, remix the sky,

Tell the glowing garment legends,

Conjure the Galactically-striding Gods

Implicit in the weighed arrangements

Of starfire.

HE

                        They’ve gone dim.

None rise. The universe-sized myths

Lie dark, unkindled by stars both dust

And cremation. These eyes are filled

With the milky gauze of glaucoma.

SHE

                           Attempt. Do not let

Them lie as they are, hearts without thump,

flatlined, comatose, wheeling on the

gurney of night. Revive the soul its

phantom celestial embryonics.

Awake the night’s thousand eyes

And start them blinking in wonder.

The stars retain their antique shape.

Zeus’ spine still holds it’s proud posture,

It’s the Cinerama behind the eyes

That’s been reformatted.

HE

I subscribe to cheap reality,

Unable to address the cosmos,

Able to address the girl downstairs.

He tries to kiss.

She moves.

HE
These tales you know dim inkling of,

All were independent spun of many

Estranged tribes, heirloom superstition

Crutching where science was unable to furnish.

Now these same fictive arrangements, lying within

Astronaut’s toe and satellite’s eye,

to mine, die amicably, the quizzic lies

supplanted by friendly knowledge,

which offers more localized wonder.

SHE

This comet-fire gliding through

My synapse is no mere chemical,

I assure, nor the night a simple periodic table;

This blood riding through my veins

Like a school of back-turning dolphins,

Is driven by the tides of what you call

Speculation, mine own hypotheses

Climbing to scaffold the airy absence

I find in you, your base of infinite disintegration,

Shifting as the wild desert floor of an hourglass’ Vortex,

this quagmire not looked on as desolate canyon,

But as space for mine own sweet milk to pour

And so fill a halcyon lake.

Please, tell me a story. Trick me into belief.

HE

(Making excuses)

A boy puts his hand in the clarity

Of a stream and comes up with salamanders.

Forgive, I know my own mind, which

Becomes most apparent through reasons.

SHE

I feel my stomach turn with the cold, blue ache

Of ancestral heat. Put your hand to your heart:

That is a star’s pulsation in your chest.

She takes his hand and puts it over his heart.

He draws it away and feels his wrist.

HE

I can’t find it. I feel nothing.

Pause.

HE

       See those there?

Appearing to be the hung lamps

of a Chinese wharf? Those are the

3 television sets of the equinox,

burning all night with peaceable

offering of Sham-Wow and Doo-wop.

A trembling effigy ignited by wayward comet,

wicker planets composed in triplicate,

where Andromeda stops to window-shop.

SHE

                                    How caged your sky!

I see not low blue torches crisping

Crème-brulee moons. I see the golden threads

Of a magnanimous queens bountiful scalp!

What raging torch’s hellfire these sparks seed!

Guiding our way to bed across

a long galaxy’s journey…

HE

May they be the repositories of souls.

May the evacuated spirit venture to the rim

Of the bubbling universe, embedding finally

In a permanent memorial of starfire,

Outpost graves of dim remembrance,

The night a churchyard, all my generations

Within one eye’s panorama.

Help me to populate future

Legends for our descendents.

As we are made of the stuff of stars,

so too may the stars be stuffed with us.

My blood is heat on parade.

Kiss me.

SHE

                      Will we die together?

HE

Let’s die now.

SHE

Wait.

                                    Not yet.

Pause.

HE
As the rearing of a fish from a pond

Longingly seeded with coin, so floats a story,

Flesh newly birthed, to kiss his food at the edge

Of our ample celestial lagoon.

He leans in to kiss her.

She moves away.

HE

This is no connect-the-dots!

This is full-bodied spectre!

SHE (Singing tauntingly)

Connect-the dots

La-la-la-la

Connect-the dots

La-la-la-la

HE

A true vision appears, a thing of my own mind,

Phantom blockade, transparent doll

of Newfangled God-Hero.

SHE                

                                        What shows this blockade?

Or is it a tale cobbled in haste solely to lull a child to bed,

Of no pleasure or matter to the teller himself?

A bribe? A mirage drying on the approach?

A counterfeit document hoping to gain passage.

Passage to my passage, mine own

well-lubricated wormhole?

HE

                                      Hear a legend of my own making,

Relevant to the situation of our day, and most ripe

This night, shared between us:

      See the cartoon dog,

Sized like a borealis, birthmarking the night,

Bloodlusting after groundhog of fur and flesh.

SHE

Hardly lustful, it chases as one dribble another.

HE

It turns at heaven’s pace,

The hog never caught always fleeing,

The dog never catching always chasing.

SHE

Hark, above, a cat, yawning at the futility.

HE

Hark, all your Gods are cats.

SHE

Hark, All your cats are dogs.

I’m Egyptian. I worship suns.

HE
How fertile these incumbent flames!

New, new, new! I did wish the story told already.

SHE

Only in the telling of two stories, or four, or more,

At one star, keeping them imperative,

Will the gated eyeballs soon revolve

To stare their twin eclipse’s liminal illuminations

Into the misinformed darkness of your horizons.

HE

When sunning on a hillside,

Beneath a day light sky,

I can cull as many creatures of a cloud

As whittler an irascible menagerie

Of the whole North Woods.

SHE

If calling the soft downy piles

“vapor-scooped sundaes” be culling,

“Bales of mothballs in a mother’s basket,”

“Pillows brusquely unstitched by houndsmouth,”

then thou art the best molder of flesh

since God’s own hand. It would serve you

to pound your own flesh, unlikely as you are

to touch it otherwise.

HE

In the young days, before to exercise

The imagination was made chore,

visions did enter the mind

like the sun-imagined day a house,

pouring unbidden through every window.

A picked-up stick instantly morph’d

Into wizard’s staff, requiring no trick,

As if touched of a Midas of “If”.

Now vision must be worked out

Like a solitary fornication.

SHE
And how the fields are a-drought!

God beds not acloud.

HE

God sleeps in the subatomic,

The omnipresent catalogue of unrest.

Everyone suspects this. I went many years

To school to refine my belief of it,

To stamp out youthful fabrication.

SHE

                                          Suit yourself.

Pause.

He looks up at the sky.

HE

It’s a carousel if you want it to be. Look.

I want to grant you an enchantment.

I want to animate the slow-dashing light.

Look: a pony, a sleigh, a procession of elephants.

SHE

They have deserted each other

on the way to the circus train,

And so are lost, holding their own tails.

HE

No, they balance trunk-wise beneath

The black Big-Top night, pocked with spotlights.

SHE

I begin to see a family afloat, juggled each to each

On the steady pendulous trapeze of midnight orbit.

I begin to see the flaming comet shot out of a cannon.

I begin to see asteroids spilling from destroyed rock

The same as a brotherhood of clowns spit from a car.

This revision of Heaven is long awaited.

HE

Yet my own belief fails at the threshold.

The stories are jests, untenable.

SHE

You exist to disprove.

HE

                                       I exist to prove otherwise.

SHE

The magic is not in proving either way,

The magic is in making it up.

HE

There’s magic in knowing.

SHE

There’s magic more in making it up.

You and your armies of the known,

Invading the last unspeculated inches

Of the dark universe. The sky is a blanket

We pull over our heads to tell stories

By the moon’s skeletal flashlight.

HE

The night is the day scalped,

Bald of protective illusion.

I’m a denizen of the boneyard earth.

SHE

You are heavy as a Devil’s throne.

HE

You have the right to private speculations.

SHE

I’ve filled a book with them.

HE

                                                You have?

SHE

An omnibus of spurred fabrications.

You’ll never read it.

HE

One story.

SHE

                    Maybe another night.

           

HE

                                                            Please.

SHE

My lids gum, sticking with sleep’s mesmerizing sealant.

HE

A synopsis?

SHE

Imagine the multitudinous times of day,

Offered by every star, every galaxy,

and every planet’s infinite angles

on respective daybreaks.

Now, paint this Technicolor profusion

Into one patchwork atmosphere:

One planet, capped by a panoptican sherbet of skies,

Every multi-leveled horizon bent back,

Studying it’s own light. This is my book:

A composite sky, swirled with every minute

Of every sun, every page imagined

By differing weather, filtered with every chemic,

A disoriented, incoherent vertigo lunging

Between moments, a spectral collusion

Of every conceivable vantage of broadcasted air.

HE

I am fundamentally baffled.

I prefer an atmosphere draped in black,

Blind of a shroud, all its thousand eyes

Clasped in permanent wink.

The stars, why have them anymore?

They’re estranged, too far away.

The night wants to be dark,

Let it fall totally.

Zap them out.  Let them choke on their

Own light. Be they black holes.

They tell no stories.

She gets up and walks to the edge of the roof.

SHE

The Wilde Beestes of Heaven are running

Silently through our sleep.

HE

When the snow fell, I thought it was

God’s dandruff, the stars parachuting down,

A billion stars invasion.

SHE

The Wilde Beestes of Heaven pound

The dusted plains Of midnight eyelids.

HE

I know better now.

Snow is simply a conference of water

gone cold in its slow collision.

I am a very intelligent man.

SHE

Listen…

Do you hear them?

The Wilde Beestes of Heaven?

ORION, the constellation, falls to the stage. He is outlined in light, with bright stars aligned on his body as they are on the constellation, his belt shining. He is broken and carved and without certain limbs, like an ancient statue.

He jumps to a ready position, like an injured hawk or ape torn from its natural environment. He freezes, and looks into a vague distance, listening like a burglar who has heard a noise through the wall. It is clear that he is blind.

The stars of his belt begin to flicker and fade. It is as if a power surge is going through him. For a brief moment he becomes blindingly bright, causing the whole stage to swell into daytime. Orion falls.

BLACK OUT.