part 1.2 'my heart is a cult of perverts'

'I, Tyrant, the Foundling'

(In the desert outside of the children’s lair by a pool of water. Image of taxidermist holding ballet slippers)

Taxidermist: I’ll poison the water, first with my image then with blood and linearity. I’ll raise an army of ghosts and make a temple just for ruins cause the future’s gonna exist again and worship this confusion.

(Blind man, dressed in tatters and with a scorched tongue appears)

Taxidermist: Who goes there?

Blind man: mmnnuhg…mnuuhgghh

Taxidermist: Your eyes, your eyes are so beautiful like smashed chocolate chip cookies. Come make your tongue whole again (gestures at the blood filled shoes.)


(Blind Man dips his tongue first in the blood and then in the water. It becomes whole again)

Blind Man (wiping mouth, pointing at ballet slippers): I know these trophies as my heart. I have been wronged and exiled from the world by the world. I wish revenge.

Taxidermist: It is within my power.

Blind Man: Then put out my eyes and I’ll summon shadows.

Taxidermist: I will not put out your eyes or cut your hair Agoniste.

Blind man: You must! Put out my eyes; sew buttons into the pits of them, spit frothy webs into the holes and massage my brain. I would pay through the nose for it.

Taxidermist: There are dark arts I can perform but it will cost the run of your blood.

Blind man: Anything, all the bulls of my disposition have been slain

The Taxidermist lays the shoes upon the pool of water they float, turn counter clockwise and darken the water. Taxidermist advances towards the Blind Man with a Scalpel.

....

Image of Giant Rabbit peeling slightly.

....

(In the children’s lair, children sit next to a spit. The girl is wearing a comedy arrow bent around her head. Her feet are at weird angles. There is a frog nailed to a board by his hands in a crucifix pose. The hedgehog is on the girls stomach. The girl is propped against a single withered tree that bears shrivelled fruit. There is also a bush charred to ashes and an elaborate system of open wooden water pipes that pour into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. )

Kid (removing the nails, lifting up one of the Frog’s arms): Someone has cut away the webbed sections of his feet.

Girl: Bugs crawl into my lobes, investigate my nose. The branches of this tree resemble coarse old woman hair.

(Kid picks up one of the webbed sections, holds it to his eye, briefly resembles Ziggy stardust. It is blown away in a gust of wind)

Kid: A plectrum sounding out the wind, picking out its anthems. (tears in eyes, saluting) Something like the days before. If only I had the ears for music.

Girl: I’m a poetess. You become a musician then we’ll learn how to found a kingdom and snort some ever afters until the weekend becomes like this big event.

Kid: My ears are full of dirt and your imagery is trite. That tree’s more like a single mouldy brainstem magnified by 10,000000 something or others or more.

(Jesus of the frog slides down the Crucifix into a slumped pose)

Jesus of the Frogs: He who hears me, hears nature weep rejuvenating tears. Life grows around me then wilts.

(Both children turn to look at him, they are only mildly surprised)

Kid: I feel fundamental. How do you talk and say nothing?

Jesus of the Frogs: With the awesomeness of sacrifice laden behind my spirit. One day I will tell you of first prophets

Kid and Girl together: Tell us now!

Jesus of the Frogs: It is for another time…before I leave you

Kid (scuffing dirt) Just like everyone else.

Jesus of the Frogs: What do the children know of loneliness?

Kid: I know as all other’s sense. I know it’s another dimension, I know it’s a monster…I know it’s physical and created by father’s

Girl: I know loneliness like our skin and clothes know the moisture in the air. This is to say I know against something. Father? What father? Your Father’s a cunt with an anus pushing through it

Kid (sullenly with tongue poking out) takes one to know one. Wait, that was really, really boring of me. Do over? Ok… your obviousness makes me obvious so why can’t I see truth for the smear of your shit? How’s that?

Girl: It stinks like your hermaphroditic parentage.

Jesus of the Frogs: This is inconsequential heathens, know through me or I’ll rescore your greatest moments into elevator music … I have that power.

Kid (angrily): I’m going to fricassee you until you’re charcoal and do your soul like a bong.

Girl: Who are you talking to?

Kid (falling backward) both of you dummy… God I just want to get high and make some bad decisions. You know; (threateningly) for the fun of it.

Girl: You’re a bad decision and a fake and I’m getting tired of your calculated animosity

Kid (looking hurt): Easy.

(From the bush, rustling sounds…a mans shadow)

Girl: My love! My Love has come to take me from this wickedness

Kid: You’re so religious

Girl: I’m not, I’m oh so spiritual jealous one.

Kid: Jealous? It was you that bore it in me. Look at my eyes, this is their only truth.

Girl: You were born from left over sins and microwaved hurt, only a cult of perverts could love you now. (To herself, aside) My heart is a cult of perverts. This must never be told.

(The kid plucks a spike from the hedgehog holds it up, it turns to glass.)

Kid: If I dipped this in your pearl-some words you could call me a sneaky Laertes.

Girl: And who I? What do you call me now… (hopefully) sister? Friend? (looks at feet) not friend (brightly) a captive? I feel like I’m riddled with syndromes that make me love you but that I’m still partly to blame.

Jesus of the Frogs: I call you both enemas! (This is pointedly ignored by the children. To himself) A product of power is laughter, I’m only this weak for a time, I must hold on.

Kid (stumbling): I, I… we need names, who will name us? I can’t exist without a name. Someone will die here tonight because of it.

(Looks nervously at girl and frog and briefly at rustling bush)

(Silence, a leg emerges)

Kid (hand held up to face as if telling a secret…directed at the girl): I’m sowing wild oaths. Ignore me sister, I am still but a baby tumour pressing against your reason

Girl: Grow brother, grow. Something approaches

(girl poses coquettishly with broken ankles)

Jesus of the Frogs: I have a great army, heed my words you pillars’ of salt, my time approaches

(kid picking up Jesus of the Frogs by the foot, the pebble embedded in his stomach pops out. His guts are multi coloured)

Kid: You’re going in the fire racist and because I’m bored. Actually there is no reason

Girl: He’s not a racist, he’s a racialist cause he’s so old and pointless

Kid: L-O-L. Seriously. L-O-L

Girl: I’m winning him back! Also he can’t say irony, he say’s ironical. Let’s have his guts for garters. He’ll dance like a dead whore.

Kid (laughing): Don’t push your luck remember it’s still your guts I want greasing my palm. By the way and for your information that wasn’t calculated that was totally ‘real’.

(Through the bushes steps God’s Invariable Man. The kid is about to spear the frog and lay him on the spit.)

God’s Invariable Man: Stop, please don’t. Enough. Please… don’t, I… I, I feel compassionate now. The tears I’m reaping are crystal balls. I see your lives in them.

Kid (to frog): who is this baby?

Jesus of the Frogs: You rolled away the sacrificial stone. Now the truth emerges. I have called and you have answered. Praise be to the most high. I bestow upon you now the gift of prophecy

Kid: Whatever.

God’s Invariable Man: I’m not a baby…you’ll see, soon I’ll transform. I know what comes next. I always know. Give me some context or you’ll all be dead In 10 seconds

Girl: I have heard of you. If context was a gift I’d be all the sadder for possessing a womb.

Kid: You’ve a womb?

Girl: Yeah

Kid: Heavy

Girl: I know.

Kid: Was I born from it?

Girl: Remembrance is a coded embrace but you’re cold and fish like so what do you think?

GIM (impatiently): 5,4

Girl: Do as I say and restrain him or I foresee our genitals pissing blood and forming wearisome rivers that lead to the past.

Gim (looking at Girl): 3,2, Now here’s an Armageddon I’ll parcel out unfairly

Kid: Do as I say? For this ‘angel of death’! You must see you’re joking? All I foresee is some more pointless silence and everyone’s tears growing fat and opaque in the dust. That is all and it’s boring, restrain yourself.

(GIM screams and begins to rush at girl. Kid, startled, hurls frog at GIM who as he charges forward, catches the body and smears it into his teeth rubbing the corpse furiously into his gums)


Frog (in mouth, disintegrating): You must know of first prophets! They leaned over the precipice of my death and were bound by it. My spaghetti bowels like the nibs of felt tip pens flowering in the tilled bed of my exposed guts. Two school children who could not ignore the glimpse of a truth I had come to embody. They laid a ceremonial stone upon me. These were my first and greatest prophets. The flesh is weak and death is supple! A lesson to fill the majority…Father save me oh, oh I am gone to shreds.

(Frog’s head fall’s to the ground, staring upwards at the kid it mouths the lords’ prayer. The kid is transfixed by it)

GIM: And now the regret! A joke made flesh, Sisyphus aint got nothing on me bra.

Girl (crawling toward him): Are you who I believe you are; who I want you to be?

GIM (in floods of tears): What would it matter?

Kid: What would you have him be? (Looks at head of Frog laying on the ground again, shudders) Mystics are boring; all their power’s circumvented and tiresome. When do we get to see dictators become cool and otherworldly huh?

GIM (drying eyes, becoming proud): I am to mysticism what you are to visionaries I.E Jack shit asshole. I came here for a real reason.

Kid: Reason being? Also answer my abstractions when I ask them.

Girl (to herself): impudence, he never answers mine

GIM: A favour.

Kid (raising one finger at a time): Your reason for being is a favour? You’re losing me, some of your ‘trite’ face and this argument.

GIM: I am God’s Invariable Man

Girl: What a name!

Kid (to himself, fist clenched): Don’t let on how jealous you are.

GIM: I am God’s Invariable Man. I’m as bored and spiritually concave as any touch stone made conscious could be. I feel the same in any given universe at any give time. Cause and effect are as distant and perfect as porno.

Kid: Why did you do that to the frog?

GIM: I have no reasons, only actions that loose demons. I am sorry for the loss.

Kid (confused): Sorry? Wait...what? But errr you said you had a ‘reason’ for being here? Or something… you’ve thrown me

Girl: Oh, well done. Touché, Sinner.

GIM: I can explain but time forbids poetry. I mean that in every way. On my twenty third birthday at 3am in any given universe I experience a sense of insight. Since I am essential context is incidental and your existence is just a rock for God’s one true organism to cling limpet like to.

Kid: I’m tired of everyone talking about my existence like it’s something that happened.

GIM: In thirty second’s I achieve a level of being beyond comprehension, beyond representational structure. It’s called ...

Girl: Why don’t you just fuck?

Gim: At it’s peak you must murder me. I believe this act will liberate me from his tyranny not just in this universe but in all.


Kid: You’re out of luck. Did you not hear my sister while you fretted in the bush? Only a cult of perverts could love me, I must serve this hypothetical love with action.

Girl: Aint all love hypothetical? (Turns away and clutches her heart and then, to herself): I know it isn’t but let’s pretend.

GIM: But you must murder me! Everything is rising in me like fire towards love and you are a reflective surface like water in moonlight, lift up your hand and shatter His representations…allow me to die in singular ecstasy away from his shrivelling sight

Girl (to kid): Why does happiness always lay itself on so thick? Still I think you should do it, I mean why not murder him? Wow there’s something potentially futuristic in that. Is there? Not sure. If only we could think.

Kid: Please listen, none of you understand… I’ve found something meaningful to me now; a vocation. I am truly sorry brother, though, to have found it in your wild evocation.

Girl: your poetry is 6th form and dramatic. Don’t ever try and spit rhymes again.

GIM (walking around, dramatically): I cannot beg when this is ecstasy. Pierce me now, pierce me now! (shoves hand in fire) There are but glorious moments to be had. (pulls hand out of fire) I count away my life in stepped beauty and here’s a pinnacle where god show’s his face…I want my life dissolved here or there, then HE might remember me and HIS smile will be wedged with content and the whole sorry super fluidity of the mechanism of his love will dry out in my orgiastic death rattle!!

Kid (rubbing his temples, walking away): That’s given me the worst headache imaginable. I hate you.

Girl (turning away from GIM and towards Kid): I feel like we should sacrifice him. That’d be sex, I’m sure.

GIM: Please hurry! You must.

Girl (turning back to GIM, looking vacantly past him, rubbing crotch): I want sex to bear me into life. Kill him now. Do we need an altar? An altar would be better but do we need one?

GIM: The time is passing, oh kill me please or hold me till I fossilize against you.

(GIM being strangled by girl but it is too late and his happiness fades)

GIM: Oh, what have you done? (Looking girl straight in the eyes with his eyes bulging) How could you?

Kid: What do you feel now?

GIM: Nostalgic. (Girl releases grasp, he moves away from her…she cries) I remember the hope I had journeying here and all the loss I incurred but could not feel. It weighs heavily upon me though it remains a distance… I know my context is incidental. In another universe I cried over a lady bug’s shit. Life is hell. Thanks a lot.

Kid: Are you lyrical?

GIM: Sickeningly so

Kid: Then curse God and die God’s fool. Also tell him to bite me

Kid spears GIM with glass quill.

Kid: Where I’ve cut you will take a long time

Girl: Alone again.

Kid: Alone? (he sniffs up against her broken ankles) Listen…this will be the invention of entertainment, this death makes us kings and queens of the daytime. When night approaches your cunt will prove a watershed.

Girl: You promise?

Kid: It’s where the light from yonder kitchen sinks.

(Kid picks up a sling and the pebble that fell from the Frog’s belly. The girl removes the novelty arrow from around her head and pulls a bow from her back. They both become an old mosaic)

GIM: This is where a soliloquy leads me away. Good night children, favoured of the God’s. There’s nothing too outrageous here just the usual sounding of an eternal incomprehensible babble finding form, cutting away at leaden truth.

(Normal again Kid Fires pebble, it strikes God’s invariable man in the tooth. The tooth falls to the floor. The girl follows it with her bow)

Kid: Call my cock a Philistine David and shut the hell up! Woah, I just named something…(turning to girl, motioning at GIM) check it out.

Girl (bored): I don’t care if you’re called Goliath or if he’s some kind of Samson, I mean Jesus are we gonna eat him? Cause that’d make me horny. Otherwise this has all been a massive waste of time. BTW I don’t want to have to say ‘Yawn’ every time for you to get the message.

Kid (to himself): I feel the relations of power shifting. I’m not into that. I’m not about that. I’ll just keep calling you bitch and then, when history begins, you’ll know your place and grow up weird.

Girl (thumb and forefinger in dead frog’s mouth, operating it): He’s out of sight, my skin’s crispy and my mind is Goo Goo Gaga.

(she raises frog to her eye)

Girl: Now, what do we see?

(The water dropping into the bucket turns to blood, it pours slowly through the hole and snakes outward)

Part 1.1 'organs'

I, Tyrant, the Foundling


Dead animals/ road kill are scattered over the stage/frame. At the front are two giant rabbit skins containing a man and a woman. These slowly unpeel. One kid is playing with a dead animal. The other, a girl, is asleep holding one particularly diseased animal like a cuddly toy.

Kid: Today my dick looks like a tank.

Blind man: Who’s there?

Kid says nothing. Leaves the road kill alone. There is a short silence.

Blind man: I thought I was home.

Kid: where are you from?

Blind man: I’m from a place where everyone is blind.

Kid: Is it better than here?

Blind man: I don’t know here except now I’ll conquer it.

Kid: How? Not why

Blind man: We can manipulate reality.

(The blind man holds his palm out, reaches behind the man’s ear and produces an egg. With a flick of his wrist the egg disappears and re-emerges through his mouth.)

Blind man: See?

(The kid looks amazed, shudders and backs away from blind man.)

Kid (to himself): ‘Because I don’t understand people I think I must be an artist.’

(He crouches down and starts to nervously play with the girls dress in exactly the same way he did with the dead animal. The blind man wanders around for a while and then trips over the kid onto the girl. He lays flat on top of her.)

Kid: ‘You did that on purpose’

Blind man: ‘Purpose? Is she dead?’

Girl (eyes still not open): ‘I like it. Stay like that. Don’t leave.’

(Her arms leave the animal and wrap around the blind man.)

Girl: I thought if I kept my eyes closed long enough I’d be the same as everything, with you in my arms it’s a start’

Blind Man: ‘Now you’ve conquered me, I can see’

The kid (stands up, disgusted). – ‘If I wanted love I’d of….’ (long pause) ‘I want love’

(Kid walks around kicking a few of the dead animals.)

Kid- These animals are no fun. All the rot’s gone out of them. I’ll make some arrangements to fix all of you.

(Shoots a malevolent gaze at the Blind man and girl and Leaves.)

Girl (pushing him off): Now he’s not here you can leave.

Blind man: You don’t want me here?

Girl: I’m the prince and you’re the dragon. Go and be blind again, find home and then we can start again. Maybe you’ll win and I’ll get what I want.

Blind man: I can’t go home. You’ve made me you and now I’m all alone.

Girl: I’m not. I’m a hero, I’ve been heroic, you can’t do shit to us now and heroes are never alone except when they’re being heroic which as I’ve explained I’ve already done. I’ve been alone.

(The blind man rubs his face in her hair.)

Blind man: Now I know what to do. I read about it. I need something with a point.

(He gets up and leaves dejectedly).

Blind man: When I come back it won’t be here because you’ll be gone. I’ll erase you until you’re just an impression of a texture that’s sticky and dead. Fuck you bitch. That’s a start but I don’t mean it yet. I love you, are you sure?

Girl: Go away. I don’t care.

(Blind man exits stage.)

Girl eyes open: Oh, Oh my love has left me.

(The kid turns up again led by a female taxidermist. As they approach the girl scrunches her eyes up in a parody of sleep.)

Taxidermist pointing at the girl: Is this the subject?

Kid: Not yet. Give it time. You could start here. (Eagerly) can I assist?

Taxidermist: If you’re good.

(She opens a case of various medical implements. She begins to skin and stuff the first animal.)

(A hedgehog, brain and backside exploded, begins talking)

Hedgehog: ‘When the tire went over I think it was what humans might call fucking. Now these hands are bringing me back to death cos dead is not death and this transaction of fluid’s got me all sewn up.’

Taxidermist explaining craft ‘’

Hedgehog: I lost my backside. I stink of shit. I lost my skull. I think of bones slivered like hay. Journeying back to death’s a representation but that’s neither here nor there.
When you die there’s a trajectory more immense, made of speed even, that overtakes the car that did not stop for a second.

Kid: When you’ve finished, we’ll trade. That’s fair right?

Kid (to himself, under breath): This is new.

Taxidermist: What can I have?

Kid (gazing at his reflection in the scalpel) anything you want.

Taxidermist (pointing with a scalpel at Girl’s feet): ‘I want those dangling from my dashboard ’

Kid (cold): you’re expensive but so be it

Girl (moving around in star like patterns on the floor, singing badly): ‘What is it when/ the love you thought you had to give/is the just the anguish you’re trying to escape?/ yeah/ yeah/ baby oh yeah’

Kid (pained, eyeing girl, in a vicious whisper): I’m sick of you baby. I’m gonna sell you piece by piece until the protein strained morsel that’s left of you won’t even riddle my sphincter

Girl (stopping): I don’t listen to you… nonsense. You’re nonsense. What I’m saying is you’re stupid and ugly and nonsensical and… wait…you’re gonna eat my brains?

Kid: isn’t that what we do here?

(kids freeze, apparently frozen in time)

Hedgehog: Skin’s like Clark Kent. When I saw myself hot and discarded I learnt that no love is sadder than its costume.

Taxidermist: A costume has to costume duh…you’re going nowhere just like the rest

Hedgehog: You can hear me? You’re basically love then, cause that knife’s a guarantee of something else and I’m so tired of everyone else and BTW Bitch-God I know a costume costumes’ but when that’s all that forms I’m tired of feeling. Tell me what I am.

Taxidermist (solemnly): Even God only traffics in surface

Hedgehog: aaaaaaarrrgghhh fuck goodbye, I’m held here

Girl ( breaking from her freeze seemingly able to hear Hedgehog, looking in his direction): I broke my own heart. I broke my own heart for this and you couldn’t give less of a shit about me. You just wanna fuck me and eat my brains. Your own sister’s brain, is this how civilisation starts? Eat me then... I’m so lonely your belly will forever growl and everyone that hears it echo will starve with love and give birth to ulcers. That’s my curse, I’ve two left, and with it I curse everyone but you. God I can’t help it.

Kid (with feeling): What should I call the world after you’re gone?

Taxidermist: Fini. Every time I climax it’s like I grow regal.

Kid (crouched around taxidermist): Good. About the finishing, I don’t understand the other thing.

Taxidermist: pay me now or I’ll unpick your seams and wave you above my narrow beliefs like a flag

Kid: (grabbing scalpel): that’s what ive been looking forward to.

Kid (suddenly dejected with knife in his hands): im a joke. I couldn’t act a flag.

(The kid appears too weary to move. The knife falls from his hand. Picks it up, sleepily and seemingly against his will. Kid moves over to Girl with knife, Girl makes snoring sounds. Kid takes hold of her ankle)

Kid (looking into weird mountain range of her anklebone): I can see my future in here.

Girl in her apparent sleep: Call me Cleopatra. You dashing snake

(Begins to Cut. Girl eyes open, shifts herself up on elbows to watch)

Taxidermist (in motherly alarm): What the fuck are you doing?

Kid: You wanted these hanging from your lobes?

Taxidermist (quickly): If you get too real, I’ll disappear. Give me those.
Kid goes to yank ballet slippers off

Taxidermist: No wait! Make them fill with blood; then we’re even.

Kid looks around stupidly. Kid breaks both ankles with hammer. In graphic novel version the panels stay on girls face to suggest this

Girl (before hammer blow): When I Dance its like I form time. I showcase time like it’s my favourite aesthetic.

(out of shot i.e not in frame, intruding on Girls face)

Taxidermist: they’re bubbling like cauldrons.

The sodden ballet slippers are given to Taxidermist.

Taxidermist: With these shoes I’ll catch the dead. (villainously exits)

Kid walks to Girls head, cradles it, strokes her brow.

Kid: This means a lot to me

Girl (calmed): what?

Kid: This…This…this moment and all the other moments…they’re beautiful aren’t
they?

Girl: we’re the first aren’t we?

Kid: First what?

Girl: The first to be in love.

Kid: I wish that were an end in itself

Girl: It could be, just keep quiet

Kid: that again
(Kid getting up)
Kid: Back to your tricks whore

Girl: I know what I know and I’ll let that one go.

(Girl lets go of dead cat and reaches for the Hedgehog)

Kid moves to dead frog, plays with its webbed hand (same as beginning)

Girl: What’s the day?

Kid: I haven’t named them yet.

Girl (looking at broken feet): So much unfinished time

Kid: That’s why we’re beginning….