Poetry Killer by Edgar Oliver A monster finds a true mirror when he first yearns for a kiss and says to it – Had I known that I was made for this, no time could have bereft me of my childhood. Or if time gave me no choice, I would have refused its treachery and stayed longer to smell out the cold in the backyard when the rain lured me to abandon until, having turned to stone, I had stayed too long. (LIGHTS UP ON INTERIOR OF HOUSE) And the smell of the earth held him in remembrance of a self that could be swallowed by the long slow mounting of the stairs in that house of rotting and disjointed perspectives – that leaky wooden house cast adrift on mud puddles whose cold depths clenched the roots of the surrounding trees and held them up – that house where a century separated one room from another, the staircase was its own dank century, and looking out the window one could be swallowed for a century by the heaving of the guardian trees that brooded for more rain. (TO THE AUDIENCE) Consider the mystery of such a house – not being allowed to touch, to delve into the secret places. My Mother had her past hidden everywhere – a past so massive and disordered it towered over us from the tops of all the closets and ate the corners of the rooms – a past hoarded so maniacally its individual pieces had gotten lost. Not even my Mother knew what was stuffed into the chests of drawers and closets, what lurked in the unused bedrooms, what dead motive held the shaky turrets of debris that swamped the hallway back from crushing us. But I had found certain books. I hid them in places where, from time to time, I could be alone. (I PULL THREE BOOKS OUT FROM UNDER THE BED AND READ THEIR TITLES) The Death of the Sex – 16 Positions for Men Only by Professor Edgardus Olivericus – London 1886 – Complete with engraved illustrations The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud Arthur Rimbaud – A Season in Hell (I SIT ON THE BED AND RAD ALOUD THE AUDIENCE . . .) A secret and horrifying act conceived from the depths of a diseased bed whose stead could not be quieted. It less creaked than betrayed – a ceaseless, breath-driven instrument, an inconsolable organ of lost stops. The mattress where my Father had been laid in death before my birth was a hive of land roving spiders – not the sedentary, web building variety but little scuttling severed hands. They ran for the walls so fast the sweep of a light’s ignition could not catch them. Sometimes in the night the bed would come loose from its moorings and float off on a dark current. I would like jolted awake while the odor of my blood drove mosquitoes to swarm against the window screen. Drawing aside the sheets I would raise my legs into the air and admire their hairless, waxen pallor. I thought of my own sex as a betrayal to my Mother. But sometimes in the night my hands would unearth my sex. Gazing at it as though it were the sex of another, I longed for it. I thought of it, perhaps, as some chaste, imaginary brother. I would imagine him lying dead in the field, murdered by his playmates. I called to him. I said – Who are you? Where have you been? Sweet boy dead in the grass, the afternoon’s all cruelty. Look with your dead eyes. There far away over the swell of the hill, the green common falls like a wave up to the distant gate and the houses look no bigger than flowerpots. In one of them your mother has not yet begun to worry at your lateness though, as always when you are not there, she waits. She may be alive to recognize you now, as I did, stripped of another childhood but formulated to the same beauty in her son blighted. (DURING THE NEXT PASSAGE I TAKE A BURLAP SACK FULL OF DISHES, POTS AND CUTLERY AND DASH IT AGAINST THE FLOOR TWICE.) His mother was a poor housekeeper. Sometimes she would climb onto the roof and beat the air and curse the sky in her rage. But whom among the living or the dead she was cursing, he could never figure out. Sometimes (SOUND OF BREAKING DISHES) she did the dishes. (MORE SOUNDS OF CRASHING DISHES) In an upstairs bedroom my sister brushes dirt from the cheeks of her exhumed dolls and grows heady from the rank smell of earth she wears as a perfume. Her charm bracelets are obscure debris garnered from the holes she digs madly all over the garden – little graves just right for a jack-in-the-box. God forbid that he should pop up! He and his sister did not play hide and seek. They played vampire and victim. Other children were afraid to visit them. It was said that at the bottom of their backyard a wound lay in the air. Sometimes he would go toward that wound alone. (I GO INTO THE BACKYARD) Oh late November sky, as grey and long as my desire to walk on you where you stretch beyond destination but painfully visible to my eye, do not kill me, but kill me many times. My life is torn away but never stop killing me. Never stop. When my senses’ flesh is stripped to the root I will be a hollow bone begging for more. (I STAND AND RETURN INTO THE HOUSE) Then, with the necessity of things pulling back from abandon, he went inside. The night’s first moths were burning in the back porch light. Downstairs it was already dark. The furniture fell back into the walls and lost substance, while the density of the house shifted up into the corners of the ceiling. His mother was upstairs practicing self-hypnosis in an attempt at calm. He must go upstairs, must reach the stairs soon, before he became too fearful to pass by the front door. He might imagine faces peering through the narrow windows that flanked the door, or hear a faint metallic click as someone tried the lock. He would stand fascinated, waiting to see the carved glass knob turn slowly and the door swing in to reveal something that had waited many years in the night to come face to face with his fear. It all happened so slow, past memory. (I DASH UPSTAIRS IN A FRENZY OF TERROR) Then, safely bolted into the clutter of the upstairs rooms with the dim shaded lights and the presence of his mother, they would drift off on the sluggish lappings of the night – a broad, black and ancient current that flowed inevitably away from the morrow and the dreaded return to school. He hoped that his mother would not ask him to rub her feet. MOTHER: (THE BOY SPEAKS HIS MOTHER’S VOICE) Rub my feet . . . Rub my feet . . . BOY: He would be forced to sit at the foot of his mother’s bed for hours, kneading and twisting, tickling and pulling at her feet. (HE CROUCHES BESIDE THE BED AND, REACHING BEHIND THE STEAD, RUBS THE FEET OF HIS INVISIBLE MOTHER) THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET. THIS LITTLE PIGGY STAYED HOME. THIS LITTLE PIGGY ATE ROAST BEEF. AND THIS LITTLE PIGGY GOT NONE. AND THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT WEEE WEEE WEEE WEEE ALL THE WAY HOME. Then she might draw the covers up a little to expose her calves and whisper – MOTHER: Rub my legs BOY: If this happened he would try not to anticipate with too much longing that in a little while she might draw the covers up about her thighs and whisper -- MOTHER: Rub my thighs BOY: He would comply – letting his slim fingers slide farther and farther up the surface of his mother’s inner thighs, listening with each fingertip to her expressions of pleasure. In his excitement he would try not to think of the triangle of shadow from which those two thighs sprang, nor of how close his fingertips could come to it. If his eyes grew used to the dark he would see in that shadowy cove the hair clad lips that he suspected he might separate, if he dared. But he never did dare – not even after she had fallen asleep. Sometimes I dreamt a corpse lay in the bottom drawer of the chest at the foot of my bed. I would like jolted awake. The night rushed towards me from all directions. I was prey to a dream. I longed to find that corpse, but knew that if I reached too far into the depths of that bottomless drawer, the ledge of shadow was a lip – a steep, downward sloping lip so slippery one false groping for that sweet dead flesh would swallow me. And so the corpse stayed down there, making nightly visitations. I didn’t know whose corpse it was. A pair of swimming trunks always veiled the face – my Father’s swimming trunks – the only vestige of him I had ever found. I kept them in that drawer. But always I awoke just before unveiling that face. All I knew was that it was a man – beautiful, dead, smelly. I had seen his fetid breast, all nipple pointed, awash among my filthy clothes. And in the morning when I rose to dress for school, I knew he was still there. Even in the day I knew he was there. I didn’t dare grope down into the bottom of that drawer for fear I wouldn’t find him. I wanted him to be there so. I cultivated his stench. I stopped trying to make Mother wash my clothes, but let them rot in that drawer, impregnated by the upward waftings of his stench. And Mother was such a truly rotten housekeeper that she never noticed I went about perfumed by the night’s homosexuality. And in the school when the other children shied away from me, and the teacher winced but was too polite to hold her nose, I was proud, for I knew my poetry had become a perfume. What was I to say? I’m in love with a dead man rotting away in my drawer, and that’s why I stink! Over the vast curve of the lapping, storied, crusted town the streets slide down like insect husks and fluted, wooden crafted houses shut their stops. Trees tickle clouds away and stir where their roots touch extinct terrors. In the day this shell of earth widens only as a dull yawn but it could swallow a whole afternoon at the first breath of desolation from the trees whose knowledge is masked by severity of gesture. My room has no corners and would wait years till my own corners were digested by the hungry bric-a-brac and an old woman’s patience with her dolls. (THE BOY MOVES SLOWLY INTO THE BACKYARD) The house had drifted further in the night. In the yard lay a sweet, slow-bleeding wound. In circles it leaked out, making a shell of the earth. As it sucked us closer the dark birds above wheeled away. Their cries of warning came back twice. I heard the earth jabbering of mud pies and ziggurats and the sweet flavor of our flesh. She said: The hollow trappings of all your royal forebears was a skull. Its brain pan hides the shape of your true love’s sex. Lest they tell, the knowledge of the trees is masked by severity of gesture. In the shallow mud lay a drowned sailor. I struggled toward him through the current of the earth, the drowning earth. But when I reached to kiss him I saw nothing but a root, massive, wet and twisted, that emerged from the earth and reentered it, leading apparently nowhere. Its agonizing was centuried and unknowable. My Mother had climbed onto the roof. She clawed the sky and cursed. But when I looked back all I heard was the wailing of a distant house.