Foreplay
Ben Goertzel, September 2001
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.
SHE: Well
HE: Did you like it?
SHE: I guess … well …
HE: Purpleness. Greenness. Undulations. Me gripping your flesh in my hands and
revolving. Ascending to the ululating heavens in a whirlpool of chocolate
-covered infection. My tongue does a dance of a thousand creations. Your
fingers corrode the reality of death. We are stoned, immaculate, bloodfellows,
insaning the braincage of love. We trample on the graves of our ancestors,
daring them to strike us down, baffling them with our courage, creating new
technologies at random, reconstructing quarks and molecules in bold
configurations – the sun is our jacuzzi, the stars our hallucinogenic mushrooms,
the black hole of non-mind is our sun.
SHE: Whoa….
Was that a poem?
HE: I don’t know…
SHE: Well…
Where did it come from?
HE: I don’t know…
Look … can we…
I…
SHE: I think that I have never heard
A poem lovely as a turd
He [annoyed]:
That is not true
That’s just not true
You’re so full of shit
SHE: Heh
Well, that’s the truth
HE: Truth?
Truth, yeah?
What is truth?
Tell me that.
Heh
Let’s go to bed
SHE: Now?
HE: If not now, when?
Enough foreplay..
SHE: Is this foreplay?
He [thinks]:
I don’t know
I guess so
[Pause]
SHE: The moon … is it … waves, rolling …. is it … delicate? … is it … neon? … is it
bold and free? Can you hold it at night, the moon, and snuggle it? Can you
whisper in its ear, caress it, call it your cutie little beauty, your snookums
pooferlilly bunnyface, your sweetie tweetie beety cake? Will it lead you down
paths of wild magic? Can you surround the moon with your flesh and tell it it’s
the only one in the world?
HE: No
SHE: No what
HE: No you can’t do those things with the moon
SHE: Why not?
HE: Well…
It’s too big, basically
SHE: Mmmm…
HE: I love you
SHE: I love you too
HE: I love you more
SHE: No you don’t
[Pause]
SHE: Do you?
HE: I love you more than poetry
SHE: Do you really?
HE: Yeah
SHE: That’s sweet
HE: Is it?
SHE [quizzical]:
Yeah, I guess so
HE: I don’t love poetry very much
SHE: Oh
HE: Can we go to bed now?
SHE: Amazing cavalcades of madness. I’m not even here anymore. I’m non-toxic.
I’ve abandoned the earth for invisible moons babied up by the bowels of my
mind. I love everything and nothing. Can you dream me a magic unknown?
Move your fingers, make the nerve cells sing? Speak to me silence in the top-secret code that the birds and the particles use? You’re the only thing, but you’re nothing. You are the man for me but you’re not a man at all, you’re a bundle of reflexes, particle and images. You stand there holding me babbling and lusting but we’re not really here, not at all, not at all
HE: I see
SHE: Do you?
HE: Yeah…
SHE: So can we go to bed now?
HE: Can we?
SHE: Yeah, I think so…
HE: Let’s go…
[Barbie disappears.]
HE: Shit
Where are you?
Shit
Where did she go?
It was like she just vanished…
Shit
Honeeeeyyy??
Hmmm…
Well…
She’s gone
Was she ever really there at all?
No, no, I know she was
I couldn’t have been imagining her…
Hmmm…
Shit.
Could I have been imagining her?
She said she wasn’t even there at all…
She said I wasn’t really here either…
It’s all just the madness of the moon…
Or something
But here I am…
Here I am…
Well….
Shit
Yeah
[Long pause]
SHE: Hi honey, I’m ready….
[Barbie reappears, dressed in lingerie this time]
SHE: What? There you are…
HE: All right!!!!
The inevitable happy ending
SHE: I guess…
Is it inevitable?
HE: I don’t know
I guess not …
SHE: Well, come on now
Don’t let’s start that again…
HE: I’m coming, don’t worry
SHE: All right, then…
HE: Mmmmm….
SHE: Mmmmm…
Yeah
[Pause]
HE: Invisible fingers. Laughing explosions.
SHE: Condensing green rainbows.
HE: Wild love.
SHE: Rainflowers. Moonshadows. Beautiful things.
HE: Blood pulsing, hearts pounding
[Pause]
SHE: What is my favorite poem?
[Pause]
SHE: It’s the air
HE: Your favorite poem is the air?
SHE: No
[Pause]
HE: Hear my breathing
SHE: Hear my breathing
HE: Yeah
[Pause]
SHE: I’ve got to…
HE: Do you?
SHE: Heh
HE: Turn this thing off
SHE: OK
[He turns the tape recorder off]