Eggbox:
An Easter Play
A play with an
unspecified number of acts, written to be acted by the audience and spectated
by the actors who will leave the stage and replenish the space left by the
original audience.
Rabbit: christen this “eggbox baroque”
a kingdom courted
by its romance
in warp and
precious frill of weft
plaintive
misgivings concerning what was
and what is left
is now cloven,
opulent and neurotic.
as if the pantry
were an abattoir
of the writer’s
hooked provisions. neat.
[vomits a pack of cards
a dickish flounce
of marginalia]
the phrase ‘wistful
trellis’ and the word ‘lozenge’
titter over
flutes of bubbling extortion.
like jinx the gazebo Scooby –
this confected
pretence is alien
but I upholster
the humid evening
with its ornamentation.
* sigh *
gemstones of
learning
grow tepid in the
half light.
[cuts
off left ear]
CHORUS: they yawn for better days.
Rabbit: [ after
plugging left ear-stump with daisies]
the thing is, there is seduction
in these evasions.
a sort of noxious allure
in perfume…
…that draws its strength from places
and people that have never existed.
the thing is so gracefully un-thinged
as to be literary. here
nibble guppies in the mangrove
pearling necklaces of gas – collect,
confect and then dissect: privilege
teeming in the arduous thesaurus.
[the daisies have turned red]
CHORUS: Pondweed, pondweed, pondweed!
[ offstage
heckles detailing the lateness of the hour
and the one-eared rabbit’s resemblance
to
a furred aerial, bent
and
mournfully visible
in its harrowing publicity
a special kind of redundancy. this is not
explicitly
verbalised, the heckle in fact
only notes “fuck
this watership clown
I’m outta
here!” this is to be followed
by vague murmurs of agreement,
supplied by the audience
by vague murmurs of agreement,
supplied by the audience
who were
originally poised as actors
and are convinced
of their own superior
abilities to
enact the rabbit’s own particular
despondence]
Rabbit: i’ve eaten from the vestigial cobwebs of my
youth…
or something similar.
it may have been important
for someone somewhere at sometime.
where is the space for the reader?
when does the world appear?
and what, if anything, is at stake?
there is no risk in wrestling a bear if the
bear
is muzzled and with arms tied and
not in fact a bear, but a large lack of bear
to be played by a non-descript dog
in a wheelchair, whose collar reminds us
this was our contrivance all
along.
CHORUS: [remains
silent and considers leaving the stage]
Rabbit: [ the
daisies have all but fallen out, those that remain are like sodden red weeds
plastered to a whiskered jaw; the rabbit has lost a dangerous amount of blood.
the rabbit
limps, coughs
twice and exits stage left. we hear the sound of a small body collapse; the
sound indicates several objects have been knocked over. a tin bucket rolls into
view and comes to rest at centre stage.]
CHORUS: [collective shrug
the chorus exit stage right.
having all left the stage, one member of the chorus returns
to retrieve the bucket
– mutters something about a leak –
curtains]
for three minutes
nothing happens and the stage is empty. on the third minute a previously seated
member of the cast-turned-audience rises and strides towards the stage to
reprise a thwarted belonging upon the boards. a spotlight picks out her path,
illuminated from chair to crawled slither beneath the theatre’s heavy curtain.
the sound of a klaxon is heard. reappearance of the actress-turned audience
member-turned actress. velvet swathes of red are drawn once again and the
audience can make out what appears to be a pot-bellied duck in a scuba suit.
Platypus: rabbit nested his impression of the world
with woollen hand-me-downs
[sneezes
violently]
bluffed
allusion.
based-in
surrey, scratched out
in airy cartwheels where the archives
natter
to recalcitrant
tumours of bureaucracy
hear ye! hear ye!
and such.
i have seen, done, heard, eaten,
breathed, excreted, dreamt, swam,
fucked and buried greater things
than were ever catalogued
in his bookish hollow.
what’s wrong with surrey?
nothing, as long as you don’t
adopt the sensibility of a brooklyn
hipster weaned on beatnik misogony
and the erudite affectations
of a harvard-educated jelly bean
fond of domesticated transgression.
like so:
[ produces
a serrated knife and begins to saw through her right arm]
CHORUS: [returns
– shuffled reluctance – watch on
as the platypus proceeds to
dismember herself.
they wait until she is just
a duck-billed torso
with one leg before bursting
into urgent song]
the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit tried
to look at living with a napkin
but the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit died
in the fluffy throes of actin’
Platypus: rabbit wanted to write in a way
that made cheese and bread
into works of byzantine proportion.
their crumbs – the winking sistene teeth,
their crusts – stern bastions of faith.
CHORUS: the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit ran
but with gammy legs and leaking blood
the rabbit, rabbit, was a man
and sleeps now in the mud
Platypus: candy floss would make accessible
what learning had edified. so the
great philosophers could joust with
with innuendo, cerebral imaginings
could be worn lightly with a flowered
turd in the lapel. and those left out
of the conversation would know. that
is not my world.
CHORUS: marsupial cynicism is as anthrax in the
ready-brek.
our lines are profoundly frivolous, the
writer is expendable.
Platypus: so
rabbit would have an experience, like he would
attend a party and get drunk and wake up
with
an unremarkable headache but with the
inclination
that
his apprehension of its unremarkable quality
was remarkable. to remark upon this state
of affairs
would require, he believed, a tissue paper effect
through which slabs of experience could
be made to shimmer.
for instance, drinking two cans of lager
became falconry
and the cut-price candles drooling wax on
ikea furniture
became lamentable arabesques of the
unfathomable.
a packet of cheese and onion became
amethyst.
instant coffee insisted upon
a more meditative correlative
found, at last, in a rustic jar of
hibiscus tea.
CHORUS: a killer in the dovecote! a plague confined to
this foul bungalow!
[ unsure of their relevance in the Platypus’
lengthy monologue, the chorus
resorts to obscurantist
references in what one member assures the others is
a verifiable and entirely authentic testament of the occult]
a verifiable and entirely authentic testament of the occult]
Platypus: this party was rabbit’s first and last experience of love.
he was dancing to a song he didn’t like when he first
saw her. a thrill of knowing that she was
looking at him
as he was looking at her, with enough
subtext to ensure
their looking was just the placeholder for
something more.
the rest of the party was subsequently
imbued with a warm
significance, everything felt as though it
was the natural
and inevitable reward of that initial
moment.
though, of course, this was heightened
by the falconry. rabbit wandered from room
to room,
would catch her
waiting for him
to
join a conversation, to move past
and trail hopeful fingers near her own. to
feel the
brushed contact and its response, glowing.
their
flirtations required no effort and became
drowsy
gestures toward an attraction now
inseparable
from the situation in which it formed – colours
of the room,
music bodily ingested, the open doors and
laughter,
stars as they fell out of the house,
swaying
hand in hand into the dark garden – its
grass
already wet with dew.
rabbit and his love
were savouring the heavy breath and
coiled suspense of their bodies. if it was
less
slurred and further from the frank debilitation
of their mutual tangle, such rhythms
could
be mapped in dance.
it was almost, it was so almost, and then it
was.
it was happening. what they both had known
and both had wanted, back in that first
look, it was
now simply and freely being. rabbit’s love
was naked
and so he too removed his clothes,
everything was
joined and sliding from its decorum back in
the regular sobriety of time and space, and
instead
now voicing its glad blurring in a hot
catching
of tongues and the touch of eyes that
previously only
thought to look but that were now as each
other exchanged,
rolling into a way of drinking the feeling
of dew beneath them
and heat between them and the almost – but
not yet – spinning
stars above them
rabbit noticed
two other figures looming over them, two
interlopers in
their perfectly blundered act.
“Fuck off” …words
that seemed to crush the drunken
flight of urgency and bring it staggering from
waves
of now and need
and you and you and and –
into the awkward
jab of pebbles underfoot.
the two figures
watched rabbit, rutting
his drunken body
further and further into a heaped
flowerbed.
flailing and thrusting, groping at
handfuls of dirt,
crying out, panting, and completely alone.
rabbit’s lover
was only ever seen and felt by rabbit
and was a very
persuasive extension of his current
and precarious
state of rabbit-mind. a hallucination.
he would see
people. people and forms and newly
imagined forms of
people, some of them dead
or returning from
death.
CHORUS: [back on
board with the platypus and having discredited any testimony
pertaining to the occult]
from the oatmeal
depths of a russet grave to its risen body, gilded with
an apricot tiara,
kissed on each and every diamond by gracious
dawn – O sweet
and darkling ambrosia – O spores of uncommon
undead
distraction – be Lazarus – be lusty – be free!
Platypus: he saw them all. saw them, felt them, loved
them.
[ saws off her remaining leg and with a sharp
intake of breath drops to
hit the stage like a sack of
potatoes, resigned to brute objectivity, to the dull weight
and cumbersome earth from whence
they came]
no more poems in
the eggbox. He saw them wander. He called them.
called
them into his arms. called them names. called them rabbit and
platypus. he spoke fondly of his
fingers, knitting them in steeples
over
his heart. these are the fingers. the singers. fluttering.
the
chorus of my action. and he saw them, called them, heard them all.
wished us together in a stitched mortar of lines, stolen from other
writers. from other ways of seeing. and those god-awful poems of his.
the word
‘lozenge’, ‘arterial’, and ‘dendritic’ thrumming in
the jumped up
swamp of over-indulged but nevertheless friendly
bacteria. and
that precocious inability to listen. gut flora.
that behind the
affectation was a posture and behind that a painted eggshell.
rabbit saw
platypus as seen by himself as neither rabbit nor platypus
but still seeing,
and it was exhilarating to know that so much,
so much of this
time and space, so much of the audience and acting,
of the script and
lighting, of those long curdled expectations,
that so much
could be so handsomely invested in what
it would now
appear had never once appeared
to anyone other
than him.
