Bare Trees, Grey Air, Black Earth: A Comedy of Tragedians in Three Acts

BARE TREES, GREY AIR, BLACK EARTH

A Comedy of Tragedians in Three Acts

 

CHARACTERS:

HIDDEN ENTITY

AIR RAIDER

NAMELESS PROTAGONIST

CENSUS REPORTER

EEK

BLEAK

SIREN HEAD

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A lone, lush grove in the center of the city, an unadorned, abandoned church. Twilight.

Act One: [Bare trees, Grey air, Black earth.] [Hidden Entity speaks:]

 

He awoke with the scarlet face of a street walker on a soft tuft of Bermuda grass near the boarded-up entrance doors to Saint Jude’s church; but he might as well have been buried beneath that yard; under the sun’s slow vibration, tucked into the folds of igneous and sedimentary… For there was nothing left of the man that was, nor the one that could have been; save, but for some traces that seemed to lie in hibernation…

Excommunicated; pariah of the masses; left to the birds to do as they will.

 

Then up upon a high-hurried and hoary hill, an opposer, who posed the host a loathsome dose of the grossest modes of character-assassination, spoke:

 

Air-Raider: “Ere’ winced a man from Ooze, whomsoever’s righteous path he hadn’t had to choose.  Not a jot or tiddle; dot or squiggle; nor neither an inkling had he to lose; for having everything already, there was nought else he needn’t woo.

Let us not make haste, and teach the man the meaning of mistake!”

 

[AR stands front and center of stage, watching each scene over his shoulders.]

 

Census reporter: “Ach! Another one! Counting the worthless has become my occupation.”

[Sings:]

 

We’re shooting snake oil in the dark tonight, my friends.

Malefic orbits black star’s shadow blotting there yonder.

In the translucent distance, the seraphim of history

hold steady beats of sublunary pinions about, in place before us.

 

The ghost that bellies the Word blows through the dolmen of our ancestors;

eddies uni-temporal. Ancient demiurges are coiled within, deep in the gut of the head.

On the obverse I verse, where there, there were two threats: the river and the people.

Cain’s progeny weltering on; oblivion crumble-sand obversely.

Coarse-course and coarser still, still mucked and mumbled out and maimed

and transferences over transferences bring about the renascence of strands like salt sprinkles or pin-prick incandescent fingers; but I diverge…

 

The curling trills of the wake woke the chthonic ones.

We’re shooting snake oil in the dark tonight, my friends.

Malefic orbits black star’s shadowing blot there yonder.

Everybody’s mote is up, stink-eyeing for a beam or two of plank-sight.

 

[CR counts dead flies in the sticky, spilled sodapop stain on the sidewalk. AR faces forward.]

 

AR: “Eek and Bleak, scowl-faced, tense with disgust for the direction of the State, bowled round and cut corners. Debating distastefully on the political and social ills of the day.  By night, gorging and orgies, devoid of hope and purpose, they engage in a series of fragmented conversations on the basest drives of human nature’s licentiousness; filled with existential musings and anti-philosophical ponderings.”

 

[Enter Eek and Bleak, still reeling from their night of revelry.]

[Bleak sings:]

 

The meta-lunged, dog-breathed, squished in,

myth of the momentarily invoked plenary sound.

The Word as vessel; transportable place.

But the vessel is no part of the living thing

and space itself is irremovable: non portable.

 

The sober cup, yet to be unchanged; proteus for all!

The tri-truculent north-wind numbs heart, numbs to stone.

The coolest blackest part turns carbuncle, begins to glow;

still unchanged; protease for all.

 

The un-word is beyond my ken.

In unexpected places at unexpected moments with unexpected passivity.

The hypostatized lack of domain; the snake-word runs roughshod.

The nadir and zenith, all points of the astronomical horizon.

 

[And sung Eek:]

 

The Word evaporates daily.

The carinate lightning-architecture: the thought                   (shudders)

lightening all but sound and smoke.

The hyperfine states of cesium.

 

The temblor-word enclitics in emotive aeration

through boundless, carnal, flesh-shrouded star-span mouths.

The murmuring mass of the darkest language;

no longer black, pulls down the toe-path.

 

Us, living in the powers we are yet to understand;

my lumbus-reach into the future quotidian—

a way to absorb new sound worlds.

Let’s join word-loins of scalar excitations,

on a sliver of consummation, a space-like slice of time,

 

hwilc goes through the blackest word-hole:

Ư̆ is a three-form in spacetime.

It is also a one-form in the phase space.

The presymplectic form. 

 

Act Two: [Bare trees, Grey air, Black earth.] [AR looks forward.]

 

[AR sings(with sarcasm):]

 

His friends, they came with words of cheer, but their comfort only fueled his fear.

They spoke of sins and hidden wrongs, as if his suffering was where he belonged.

He sat upon the ash heap’s mound, his body covered in sores profound;

waiting for answers that never came, in a world that seemed devoid of aim.

 

[CR (from afar) sings:]

 

Many, upon all times, all things have gone through the eyes of others.

They pull by the spurs, half the size of the iron soles.

They grunt, covered and clad in wet, fragmenting clay,

Clod-feet. Long and heavy is our great great great great great grounded grandfather.

 

He nods up, red, straining his scaled nape,

quadrupling his gray-ish brown black and brown silver pixelated chin.

He says nothing but his bump of an iris rolled thinly beneath the veil-skin;

His eye-face leather, flaps thrice;

 

pulled like semi-taut pink metallic splotched veins- frilled curtains.

And the swanky chainmail shirt and the armor glistens

like silvery minnows in linked rivulets gnawing dry ravines

like thousands of scraping unguis and talons and claws on the earth like slate,

teaching the ear to prostration.

 

They are dragging him out of the black miry bog,

to the cataract geyser of wild fiery roses,

a path nestled neatly between two naughty, nuclear nations.

Through the tetramorph garden: on and at our peril of a path…

 

[Eek and Bleak encircle, like vultures, the protagonist still lying on the grass. Their presence casts a shadow over the scene.]

 

B: “Why?! Wherefore do you tarry here, ensnared in suffering’s cruel grasp?? What purpose does it serve? Is there any meaning to this symphony of anguish, or are you but another vessel adrift in fate’s capricious sea?”

 

E: [to Bleak] “He must endure, my friend. Perchance hidden amid his trials lies the empirical data, the laws veiled amidst the chaotic maelstrom of his state.”

 

[Enter Siren-Head.  His mile-tall, gray, menacingly emaciated frame and three megaphone mouths wailing, breaking and crumbling the already crumbled infrastructure which surrounds the other characters.]

 

Siren-Head: WHEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOO

 

[Census Reporter awkwardly stumbles, falls, pulls himself up by the bootstraps and rushes down the hill towards the scene.]

 

SH: WHEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOO

 

[The three characters stand around the protagonist, looking down, looking at each other, looking down, looking at each other.  They scream to each other over the constant wail of Siren-head.]

 

CR: “Circular arguments, empty platitudes and hollow reassurances; your suffering is a consequence of your actions. Repent, seek absolution through contrition and redemption!!”

 

SH: WHEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOO

 

E: “No, no, no, ’tis a trial of faith! He must endure, finding solace within his suffering.”

 

SH: WHEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOO

 

B: “I once heard whispers of a One for whom if we wait… Where was that? Who was he? Might he bring relief?

 

SH: WHEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOOOOWHEEEEEEOOOO

 

E: “We wait, Bleak. We bide our time, waiting for a sign, a moment of clarity that may never come. His suffering persists, our questions unanswered.”

 

[SH totters, tilts, stiffens into another direction; his wailing dies down.  Eek, Bleak and the Census Reporter stare mindlessly down, as the protagonist shakes his head, stands up, brushes himself off, walks away.]

 

HE(Hidden Entity) sings:

This age is a stutter, afoot; a great stammering, toddling forth, unsprung from the enigma; cradled and jabbered at in tongueless effigy; disseminating decimation. The great exemplars, untold; unprecedented failures; flailing our arms in the wind to herd,

to dislocate our own creviced comprehension-less tour de force against ‘against!

Aghast at unholy unbecomings, unrelenting twinges, reflections’ twitchings twists. Undefined. The hour has rung; the unraveling, unsnarling cloth is rift, between dispositions, who will listen?  Who will speak of it without a splintered tongue?

 

[Sun rises, birds chirp, dew drops.]

 

Act Three: [Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift][Birds twitter, leaves rustle, clouds drift.]

 

Curtain.