A play in five parts. A de/re-construction of the mass. An undermining from within. A collaboration. First compiled and performed by vicious trap in March 2010. Some things were borrowed from: 9/11 Commission Report, Battlestar Galactica, The Bhagavad Gita, Sir Thomas Browne, Lenny Bruce, fjords.com, The Frames, Adolf Hitler, isoglossia.com, Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski, Groucho Marx, Meat Beat Manifesto, John Milton, Modest Mouse, George Orwell, Papa M, Vanessa Place, Pythagoras, The Staple Singers, The Temptations and William Butler Yeats. Other words were written by Dan Eisenstat, Aaron Liechty, Eric Meyer, Julie Rada and Nadia Waggener.

01 OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY

a pristine set
everything in white
a sterile science lab
a bathtub
a repeating tone

throughout,
the words are spoken
by actors
in the ‘choir’
lit with scripts and lecterns
as the action plays out in front

black
 silence

a hum grows
feedback
the tone returns
repeating
there is a voice:

and then we separated the inside of our houses
from the outside of our houses
we all know the dust cannot be swept from the dirt floor
we all know the bacteria cannot be scrubbed from our bodies
from our skin
from our selves
and wash it down the drain
down the hole

down the mighty mississipp

the muddy
the ganges
down the san andreas
to the center of the earth
the universe
the veins

in my eye

wrong

this ain’t grace
this all fucked
this old thing

wrong

wash me down
wash me down
wash me down

a harsh light
a silhouette
blood on a lab coat
washing hands

and from within him stir
the hell within him
for within him hell

a pause

please continue

the washing continues
it becomes jagged and stylized
a repetition of itself
the hum is feedback
there is a scream from all directions
the washing stops
so do the screams
and all sounds
the silence is deafening

I can kill you but instead I hold you tight

the silhouette becomes limp

the trash requires that you continue
the trash requires trash
 continue

washing / sporadic
screams when the hands are in water
stops
has the water become blood?

it is absolutely essential that you continue
it is absolutely essential
 continue

the washing is frantic
the screams are frantic
full body

it is only a job
the job requires it
the job
there is a speck
cut
dissect
a speck of dust
cut
on your father
cut
in your shadows and up your ass the contamination
the cut
cut out
you have no choice
dissect contamination
it is only right
it is just
you have no other choice
you must go on

soaked
the body collapses
as do the screams
and the feedback

I’ve never dripped in punishment
quite
like
 this

02 LADY GAGA: PRIEST

an explosion of light
and music
and people
and Lady GaGa
a boy fabulous pumps and confetti

doors open and slam
in an orgy of sex/violence
people in love and hate
- in embarrassment and humiliation - sudden grief, anxiety - dread - distraction and envy and greed - and lust - an army of pecks - a liturgy of squawks - a broken wing - cobwebs and tongues and elbows, angels and lips while this song is sung:

I fold you into my mouth
that goes
that leaves
and now i will destroy it all
I can’t help it
it all embarrasses me
and so I’ll fuck it
and mourn it
what?
where was i?
now now now nownownownownownownownownownownow
crash
oops
crash
fleeting
tickle/giggle/fidget and bounce
a blanket of sadness
dropped on me from the gods
from the ghosts of grandmothers and illusions and dead cats
forget it
can I put you in my mouth?
because
cuz
I desire it
drop it
(I can kill you and take all your money)
and hold you tight
just lay on my chest
feel the comfort of heartbeat in your ear pressed to my skin
the weightedness
the love song
loins
don’t look
don’t behold
me
mememememememe
a wish
I am Prada,
born among the demons,
and of all that measures,
I am time
I am I am
the cow that fulfills
I am
the power of sex
and
the king

by the end of which
Someone has jumped from the acropolis
and hung themselves

03 AN ARMY OF GOD

The twin notions of microcosm and macrocosm neatly model the dominant orienting lens of Western thought. From the pre-Socratics on, thinkers who contend that they have discovered cosmological truths argue that man is a little world embodying the structure and traits of the greater universe. To know the universe, they say, look carefully at man, and all truth shall be revealed. As man breathes, so does the universe (Pythagoras). As man fights interior battles between good and evil, so they must exist on a grander scale (Sir Thomas Browne). And to affix such a connection: a maker to make cunningly. And so on it goes.

other voices and texts join in
they are hitler and groucho marx
and the scum manifesto and tweets
and status update blog post personal diary
literature and everything:

Concentric circles in the mind. Interior in conversation with the exterior (or the inverse), and again and again we are re-creating what we know most intimately: cyclical motions from the smallest to the largest scale. Cycles of our hours, our days, the circular motion of my hand in the air is a mirror to this cycle of All We Have: aka life (unless we subscribe to the promise of After. Life. And isn’t this promise of Something HereAfter so much of what brings us back, circling back, week after week, to the Pew, the Alter, the Psalm, the Incense and the Water, Genuflection at His feet? The promise that, if we do this right, are appropriately sorrygood, then this is all just the white-walled waiting room, the cloak room to the AfterLife that counts?) . Creatures of habit, we find our pattern, conscious of duplication or un-.

the voices come and go
forming patterns and rhythms
fighting and joining
soloing at times
and fighting with and against the music
in rhythms and sudden bursts
and building
to a dissected and broken mess
of voice and text and sound

its not like he knows some way better
he’s not a better player at this than you
we all just pick a body part and fill it full of holes
and yeah he can walk he’s got two legs, but one arm’s on the ground
and you can smile with all your teeth, but your eye keeps rolling round
we all pick a quick disease – you’ve nymphomania, i’ve ocd
and we think if we swapped we’d be more free
but your sickle-cell is my ptsd

fuck all y’all, go fuck y’all selves/ i built this dog-pit, shit/
and, by god, i’ll fuckin’ die in it
i’ve just four yards of soiled old siding and a roof to keep out the stars
and every year i’ve spent here sinking deeper into the yard
if i’m not this place, what am i then? what have i been building for?
you mean the world to me love, it’s just the world was supposed to mean some more
the world is every full field of human beings, refugees and lost old things,
humoured, ailed and darkly scanning, human child in the ditch damming /damming up the streams,
god up in heaven laughing/cause we’ve no lessons to pass on to him

maybe you let one orphan in, air out his boils of puss and sin
your healing hands take care of him, but then
you found that after him you’d opened the door and the whole crowd’s in:
camelbomb in ramallah or terror ring in old berlin all mammal animals an’ god made man mammalian, hebrew/ hard-up lebanon/ leadbomb led and baby limb/ bled lobbed bobbed and baby scream/ bits of body bombing in/ beat-up bolts and bobblin’ in/ lebron palms the ball and bobs it in/ we watch it all on televi’n/ world’s worse in way we wave it in/ palmolive, mall of ‘merica and malliseum (it’s all i see em)/ i see all of em/ i fuckin see just all of ‘em/ shut my head, but all of ‘em/ like zombie men keep comin in
every cell keeps leakin’ in/ i up-end the door and scream/ but what was behind is in i let it in.

unison:

i let it in. i let it in. i let it in

solo:

fucking bitch cunt ficking death queenie death til you die til you die til you’re dead til you’re dead

04 RIPPLES WHEN YOU STOP

silence

more silence

lights up
bodies still
in mid-motion
the motion is wrong
the lights go out
and up
wrong
and out up
wrong again
and out

a note on the piano
leads to another note
and another

a match is lit
and lights a candle
and another
and several candles are lit

someone in a bath:

I could say I believe in the world today
that each day will follow the other like pots to pans
that the cog of my life turns with some precision
even that when I am dead I will die
and stay that way
I know this
I know the skies
black
yellow
black
on and on that way
and the old dragon and his crony angels
are nowhere to be seen
looking for guns and gold and gasoline
I could say that I believe in this
that it is

someone else attempting and failing

stand up, sit down, kneel
 repeat

someone making tea
or combing hair
or moving through Taekwondo forms
slowly:

on the way home from work
I got onto i70
I missed my exit
but kept driving
I noticed after an hour or two
that I was no longer merely driving east
past gaudy warehouses and outlet stores
but driving back through years

while in the bathtub:

every day I cut back the rust
my heart is a muscle
the only thing
left tensed when I sleep
like a face down in the gravel
I have to wonder
after the workday
I scrub at my hands until they grow old
I am too young
for this
what I didn’t make or take still played out
plays out
every fucking day
fucking federals,
goddamn fools. Next time kick yourselves out
cut your own damn faces up
god doesn’t care, he doesn’t give a fuck
he’s as tired as the rest of us

tea/comb:

I passed the room where I got my first blow-job
the day I stopped going to church
the bathroom I took my first pill
the rundown church where the holy spirit entered me
the airport I left for Africa
the street I first got mugged
the theater where I lost feeling
for the first time
to when I was eight
and lived on a street with fuschia bushes
and snail-slicked paths
and football outside everyday
and, you know,
it never would have crossed my mind
there as an eight year old child
that I’d ever even make it to 29
and be a man who stood 6’2 and 300 lbs
with a shaved head and childish lips
who lived a mile above sea level and laid naked with women
and didn’t believe in god
who had felt the pentecost
believing in magic
sitting with homeless on iona road
reading bible verses at them
whose mind, heavy with stalagtites,
had, one day, just caved in.
but then, I suspect,
that no one ever ends where they expected
or is not horribly changed
by the arriving

Some days I walk the 2.4 miles across the bridge,
along the freeway,
past the man in a Mad Hatter outfit
spinning a sign selling BBQ Ribs,
past 3 bus stops where a woman is stuffing her purse with blank slips of paper,
just to buy a large coffee from the 7-11.

Some days I get so lonely I forget my own name

bathtub:

I only notice the ripples
when I am absolutely still

sex
with lady gaga
slow
everything in rhythm to the sex
 breathing

washing hands

Lady GaGa prepares for her death
and her birthday
with a cake
and candles and two ‘voices’ working together:

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;

As I speak
highly civilized human beings are flying overhead,
trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me
as an individual,
nor I against them.

Most of them,
I have no doubt
are kind-hearted.

Law-abiding citizens
who would never dream of committing murder
in private life.
But
if one of them succeeds
they will never sleep any the worse for it.
They are serving his country. They will be absolved from evil.

and hangs herself
while saying:

my hell comes from inside myself. why fight this?
no one’s gonna play the harp when you die.

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

and lights the candles
and eats some frosting with her finger

I’m not fighting because I believe in it
I’m fighting because I don’t know what else to do.

the place becomes holy

someone arranging trash
in neat rows across the entire space:

my grandmother survived the war barefoot, scavenging other
people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat,
skins, and the bits that clung to bones.

food is not food. it is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course

love

terror

sacrifice

they make trash angels in the trash

animals and humans
entrails
guts on canvas
kisses
guts on canvas
kisses
bowing to the blood
dissolution of the self/ves
orpheus torn limb from limb
a lamb’s head floating on a river
dancing/fucking in the guts of a beast

as I breathe, so does the universe

Lady GaGa is about to die

what happens when the heart just stops?
no more to breathe, no more to grieve, coming home
remember to live before you die

pause speaking now for herself (the first that an actor has spoken):

make a wish

she blows out the candles on her cake removes her shoes and prepares to jump

what else do I have to do today?

she jumps from the acropolis
and hangs herself
and dies
face down in the cake

05 A CONSPIRACY OF US

dark
music
as there is light
and everyone moves
in single file
across the room
throwing confetti on the audience
while
jokes might be told about suicide and death
and they cross to Lady Gaga
and serve each other cake

do they offer the audience birthday cake as well?