Saturday, March 26, 2005
Foreplay by Ben Goertzel
A poem-play, to be performed by a man and a brown-skinned Barbie doll. The Barbie leans against a tape recorder, which plays a tape containing the woman’s speaking parts.
SHE: Talk to me, baby
Talk to me, baby
Talk to me
[Long silence]
SHE: Talk to me, baby
Talk to me
[Silence]
SHE: Talk…
HE: What’s your favorite poem?
SHE: I don’t know
HE: Touch me with fingers of love, carry me to the moon on your wings, astound me with shadow love…
SHE: No
HE: Northeastern Alaska?
SHE: No
HE: Pork chops
SHE: No
HE: Soft light kisses all over your body, incurring trembling rhythms and shaking
and…
SHE [smiling]:
Noooo…
HE: Come here, let me kiss you … kiss ….
SHE: No. Not now…
Not yet…
[Pause]
HE: Dante’s Inferno?
SHE: No
HE: Paradiso
SHE: No
HE: Purgatorio
SHE: No
HE: Broken Oreo?
SHE [scowling]:
No
HE: The Battle Hymn of the Pubic Pirates?
SHE: No. Certainly not.
Come on, don’t be ridiculous
HE: Why not?
SHE: … I don’t know …
[Pause]
HE: The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost
SHE: Heh. No.
HE: The Crap Not Taken, by Charles Bukowski
SHE: Noooo….
HE: Rainer Maria Rilke, the Duino Elegies
“If I cried out, who would hear me up there among the angelic orders?”
SHE: No one would hear you
No one would hear you at all
No one hears anything you say, you moron
Haven’t you noticed that?
HE: Well….
SHE: I think that I will never hear
A poem lovely as a beer
I think that you have never bled
A poem lovely as my head
I think that you have never smashed
A poem lovely as my ass
HE: Well…
[She stares at him, hand on her hip]
HE: You know, I’d have to agree with you there
So honey … how about we forget about all this poetry crap and sort of …
head toward the bedroom, huh?
SHE: Nooo….
Not until you guess my favorite poem.
HE: That wasn’t it? That thing -- I think that I will never hear and so on?
SHE: No
HE: Alive words pound against my skull like poisonous, accelerated drops of rain.
Amazing skewers of ulcerated madness riddle my heart and mind. My body
yearns for you, explodes for you, sings for you bullets and soft tickled babies; my
mind reaches out to explode you, to love you, encompass you, to dream you, but
you always just pull away enchanting, wondering trembling but just out of reach.
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