The Interrupter

(A VERY REAL WOMAN touched with bee’s vomit sits on the park bench beside BRENNAN and, paying no mind to the fact that he is reading, her voice takes root.)

VERY REAL WOMAN
Spring—it’s no different again
This year. And it makes no difference
That it remains the same. I am
Sick of carrying on, always
Forward, blind. I would show my wisdom
To those who’ve left their histories
To read, their philosophies
To stir, for they are the ones my voice
Desires to impress, who have
Impressed me. What is the future? Language
Will crouch, waiting, in the same darkness.
It remains an absolute: an emptiness
On our tongues, in our children, in
Our dead. The purpose of speech: to hear
Silence: but we, we fashion sound
A struggle. We fail the silence. We hear
The wave, but make no sense of the sea.

BRENNAN
(Reading aloud from his book
“He needs no archetypes, no figment of eternal return, no symbolism of regeneration of time. Camels are camels are camels . . . they are the stuff of things.”

David Brennan