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.
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.
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,
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
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!
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!
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.
