| From Blue Night | |
| Andy Schuck | |
 | Spotlight on Night/Mother Ain't Far Behind Cub: A nickel blister begins the same. Emcee: Then a dribble on his chin forgotten with a whistle. Dove (aside): The early ones were pretty routine ... but now there's no take one. Emcee: There was a mumbling from the flames -- but no one seemed to notice. Cub: A loud abrasion surfacing, the nickel blister pulsing. Emcee (much later, over a drink): Dont worry, the old crocs won't bother you unless your bird sings. Emcee (present, spotlight): Ignore, then, ignore, if you will, the dove. And take some of my righteous pounding. THEM bulldozing the language, stuffing their suits with our feathers. How about make them fly high into the light, so they might return blind and tell us they saw the colors and the prisons behind the linen? They, no longer mute about the colorful other lights, the lights that embrace eyes and ears. Lights which trace lines across the underside of an island. (Cub: Whisked down on plicked wedges of wings --) the tubble timble fondle guitar reasons, kindles chromatic strings. (Pause) A horn solo by Cub will conclude our evening. Cub: Listen for the glisten of hair. The gold-plated glisten. (Emcee thinks while Cub plays) Emcee: The sound of night -- the lip of a satin scarf, the spit on a crisp dollar. Light the cigarette in my eye: in my light, the eye which flutters. In the light, it cries without eyes. It alights. Not without matters. But fight. Cub (invocation): Whisk away the shoes of silence. Rip a corner in the night. Fall upon basement shadows. Make a trip to your prisons. To keep the hounds out, to convey the bounds of light. Lift eyes to paradisal pool of blue blue blue. Careening through the nectarine sun to green. Jewels in her eyes. Let her carry night. Behind her back and whoop it around her golden head-dress. Then back through her legs (hiking up the linen), spinning it on her head, her finger, her slick-shiny knee. Spinning herself on Egyptian toes. Her smile'll singe old pyramids in me. Emcee: But night growing, night spreading deep into her dress. Cub: Night encompassing the shadow, her red dress, my prisons. She gathers up the ground, puts me in her mouth, fur, feet, and all. Her lips unpuzzle and corrupt me: pursue-puzzle-and-crunch me. Tongue lifts me toward her lower lip. I look in, seeing the firm teeth and the hollow cavity: giant white craters and beautiful slobbery pink. Tongue running the top of her cavity. She closes. Hydraulic slow but steady. Newsboy: Woman crumbles subway! Instruments on the loose! Cub: Shes inside my mouth, her bulging eyes watching the teeth chew me down. She's crawling around the inside of my cheek. Upper lip crawling into a surf of saliva. A surf with an emerald dress on. Staring at the linen in her hands. Humming a pearly string of notes. Then a growl (Emcee: And a howl!) that jumps her to her feet. She wants to start my whipping. Pulls the dress from her heads and bends and bends, until its long and barbed and sharp. She sings of Egyptian ornithology. She closes her eyes, hits high piercing notes that transform saliva into crystal bowls. I can barely stand. I either wish to roll into the tongue (settled surf and listless) or curl into a bowl of saliva. Outside the corner of her scream. Emcee: She finishes her singing and daubs her mouth. Cub: I slide down her neck before she can lift me. Jump off her shoulder. I speed into the night: threads of blue-black splash from the liquid at her feet. (Emcee: Threads strung like arms of seaweed.) She moves awkward through this aqua-grease in her slow river motion. But then a rumble from above and fast paws behind her. The white thin horizon is reaching, teaching, over-preaching for her. Starts on the lips as a whistle then groups full into gross, accompanying liquid. She: Whoever doesn't like what I did can go back twenty years from now and change it! Emcee: We now have a character change. Insert Davis for Cub. (She has taken Doves place, if you haven't noticed.) Davis: A message on the inside of my door: I meet the loud tenor out back. Bring rhythm and regicide.i Written in two tone blood. No signature. A scribble, perhaps a crocks smile- or his armored hands. I lift up my head. See it needs more lift from me than before. A dove flies. I screw angles from my eyes and then all the music hits me. But I'm collected enough to snatch my jacket and make a bee line to the door. Nobody outside. Emcee: He knocks his head around, then finds a shadow upon the sidewalk. It blisters near a crimson line. The line fumes red then green, red, green. Neither stopping long enough to reason. Emcee: In a storefront, a digital red message: "Follow the streetlights to the edge of night. Purchase a guitar. In it, a whisper. Take it seriously. Cover it with overcoat or hood. Give it a good throat. Good ears. It doesn't need rephrasing. It's not a song but a message. Get there tonight."(Pause to get Davis in motion. Davis walks, but walks in place, static) Davis: Fingers in my pocket fumble with blisters. I think of nickles and lesions and lakes. Lakes the moon appeared in, and a thousand different whispers. Moonwhispers like: "let me out of this reflection." Theres a cow behind the whispers of the moonlight; its bell bound in timeless silence. Whatever song the cow blurts out dribbles into street by already GONE drops. Drops which can puddle into pools crystals crack through. Street melts to reveal a whirlpool of prisons (one without a warden). Streetlamps warp into warm spinach noodles. Emcee: He climbs a back alley bridge missing a step or two -- which seems safe considering the riverbeds dry. The lady that was chewing him is now two minutes back, twisting her dress into a fifty, looking for shoes or a bed. Davis: I'm sniffing grasses, forgetting about that message, that guitar lick that I hid. Forgetting an open back seat and then a dry, pimply itch. Im beginning to forget what got me going. I listen for a sizzle or a ripple or some other sieve. Lift my arm, perhaps, and open my sleeve. Emcee: Thats not permitted. Also, streetlamps that have turned into noodles cannot be leaned against. Davis: I look into the belly of a red brick building, into bloated hallways bleeding graffiti. Past a grotto fire, a mono reggae dub. Hieroglyphics cover the insides. Rhythm and textures cover the insides. Chrome suit in the shadow asks for a light. A whistle in the corner turns red bright. Silver silos and the sun erupt up over the Plains. Goddamnit, that tall bitch is at it again. Emcee: Not to mention his frostbitten snout. Davis (hunched, humbled, low): I imagine pink ribs calculatedly breathing. First easy, then dark ribs switching heavy. Then rat feet romping up to a clawed and stripped ceiling, which opens onto night. (Emcee: If I turned upside down, would be the ground be burning down?) Im hanging over night, shoulders and hands and particles from my eyes dripping into dust. Dripping into silver bubbles, slowly charging the crevassed litter. Emcee:(forward of Davis, looking back): He congratulates himself on his phrasing but soon sight leaves. Davis: I smell a pot of shoes boiling in the corner. My feet getting warm, accepting orange from the fire. The orange glow wishes to run through me. A rabbit spark hops out -- all the dogs on the logs are sleeping. The spark starts high: sniffs my toes and nibbles the veins in my feet. Then tries my knees, works its way up my black thigh- by now Im screaming HIGH heavens to the night! The sparks bedding me in leafy nibbling. She (unseen): Luscious honey falls over his eyes. Emcee (in the firelight, coalescing-convalescing-second-guessing): You have no socks on and it's going to get cold quickly. Davis: A crack of a log, a spark, a rip, the night growing thick through my vision, my vision draining back into me. Filling up on tympanic whispers in my feet. Feet crumble under my weight. Under trees. Emcee: He five-fingers four thimbles of green tuna from the factory that rats slip into every Monday to clean. Davis: Trees whistle, trees. Trees -- whistle to them when I speak. |
