WALL:  Patch up the old saw horse.

 LAMP:  Dry your eyes.

 GUNSIGHT:  Hemispheres of bisexual harpoons.
 (Exit all)



 HERCULES:  Rabbit holes thicken as night descends on the poor little village of San Salivate. Quiet bicycles patrol dusty trails  through thick pans. The quiet old men eat their wives to the delight of several dozen quick typewriter ribbons. Ink is aplenty.  Silent jackals rummage through barnacle whores in search of nutmeg and plasticine monuments. And here is the worst of my  spheres realized…

 (A 20 foot black ball is unveiled where the cubes were before.)

 It rasps, it cries it dies. Never before seen on this planet, a tender earthquake spies into every nooky. Plaster busts of Napoleon  shitting cry in the night for an audience. Thousands of ancient butterfly wrappers cringe beneath the dignity of one dignitary.

 (Suddenly a naked man on lion back rides onstage)

 MAN:  I have ridden this lion since I was lionized in the heart of the Parthenon. Practically none of me escaped alive. The  faster the risks, the longer the grenade.

 HERCULES:  Why so blue, senorita? Have not the aristocratic zephyrs from Zanzibar also washed clean the ears of my  volcano mistress? Tons of earth I have dug from the back of my grandmother as she lay on top of the equator.

 MAN: Why then are assiduous apricots caught only in July? Why? As I sleep every day the lion picks swordfish from my  nostrils. Is cremation the factory of lighthouse dragoons? Tell me if the stars are in the sky or am I only dreaming.

 HERCULES: You are twice the man I am. To you it is only marshmallows around the solar ivy. Cloudy rubber sun is  tomorrow the small shoes that I put on my alligator.

 (From around the large sphere rides a bear on a bicycle decorated as for a parade.  Strapped to his back is a phonograph  playing an orchestral piece by Beethoven.)

 HERCULES and MAN (drowned out partially by the phonograph record): 
 Trample six old men. Trample six old men. Trample six old men.  Trample six old men. Trample six old men. Trample six old  men.



 LAMP:  Hemispheres.

 WALL:  Physical gas.

 GUNSIGHT:  Pall bearers bearing crypts.

 LAMP:  Nightshade

 GUNSIGHT:  Pull up the clouds.

 WALL:  The old locomotive we call summer is fast disappearing behind the big tree in the corner. Bleating fire extinguishers  call out their greetings to dwarf cannons who quickly sail the long passage between air and an oyster pincushion.

 GUNSIGHT:  Blankets.

 LAMP:  Of course.

 WALL:  Where is that large ball?

 LAMP:  Pretty balls of camels.

 WALL:  Basket hoops.

 (On to the floor roll dozens of small spheres. They are silver.)

 GUNSIGHT:  Royal spice has descended upon us. These mother of pearl rectums find countless deserts cooling their five  senses.

 WALL:  Ice cream cone triangular caravans of the sands of pamplemousse.

 LAMP:  Processed finery out to lunch. Magnetic field mice crash through barriers of pure mercury. Masked practitioners of  railway bands thump.

 WALL:  Can all the threads which sew together the planets create true millinery?

 GUNSIGHT:  Where is our great Hercules?

 WALL:  Pearl.

 LAMP:  Pearl.

 WALL:  Pearl.

 LAMP:  Pearl.

 WALL:  Pearl.

 GUNSIGHT:  Pearl of my mother, the seaside piano dinosaur.

 WALL:  Pregnant smokestack bends toward the back wood stars. Operating here cools my bunions in several biscuit radiators.

 LAMP:  Campfire cussing hangs by its diapers on the electric noodle. Photo pimple casts its spell on every lunch hour. Cloud  fire earns respect upon the hybrid caterpillars having for their sons the end of each year.

 (Loud clattering is heard offstage announcing the entrance of thirty foot plaster lion which has clinging to its sides several  dwarves with long black caps almost as big as they are. It moves onstage and stops, at which time a shower of top hats rains  down from the ceiling onto the audience.)

 WALL:  My moustache is an aqueduct carrying the vessels of hay.

 (The stage resembles an endless green lawn stretching away to the horizon with huge grey spheres end to end as far as the eye  can see. The sky is blue with large white clouds. Alongside the spheres, which are about twelve feet high, walks an  anonymous-looking little man in a black suit. He seems to be inspecting the spheres in the manner of a railway man who walks  along beside the train in the station, tapping the wheels. A huge hand comes down from the sky and picks up on of the spheres.

 LITTLE MAN:  (mumbling to himself):  Mother of pearl. Mother of pearl.
 Everything is this strange Mother of pearl. Mother of pearl.

 (The wind blows louder, the clouds fleet across the sky toward the golden arch at the end. A magnificent rainbow appears over  the whole scene and the little man who is drawing nearer is no longer small as he was in the distance. He appears enormous,  huge, 80 feet tall. He crashes through the heavens and is transformed into a spectre of pearl and gold.)

 LITTLE MAN (now a golden giant):  This tranquil scene is the final stage of mother of pearl. How clear. How clear.

 (The golden giant’s voice is now unbearably loud and it and the wind crescendo to an incredible level at which point the scene  ends.)


 HERCULES:  Purple noon aggravated trident triremes of perpendicular schooners. The equinox of descending rabbit fur  curtails bright, cloudy and barnstorming nuptials. Countess Hoffenmier is a lazy fly, golden in the sun. Try to see the end of  loose flags, in particular wedded to mean time and peppers.

 WALL:  Time and time again, Hercules, oh son of the frigate, we have ventured forth to seek out raspberry pole-vaulters and  cross-eyed caterpillars. Steamship papyrus marked our course to the unwedded wonderful fulcrum of tarnished delights.

 HERCULES:  Wall, then you must practise.

 GUNSIGHT:  Cannot you invest a mere rattlesnake fire extinguisher in that merciless bathrobe we call our moon.

 HERCULES:  Several marsupial paratrooper nuts are sitting where once we laid a cotton maggot-gear to rest.

 LAMP:  Carpeted man-o-war rests easily on the pinnacle of several dusty love affairs.

 HERCULES:  You and that cow fled to Ethiopia on the first moneyed sap.

 WALL:  The fondled rests its weary kiosk after plying the dreariest courses of the Panama Canal.

 LAMP:  Once a gigantic wall flowering machine rented its platypus pampas to earthly grandmothers.

 HERCULES:  By now you see the plot.

 GUNSIGHT:  Why yes, only now the eternally serene wheelchair vagabonds are entering the courtyard armed with spaghetti  and ram’s horns. Coming two abreast they will smear slow kettle drums about the heavens.

 HERCULES:  Congratulate the effortless recitalist in the jungle with sheep and railway ties.

 WALL:  Ali Baba could not earn more in one year of pin-pointing the effervescent eons.

 LAMP: Alley oopé

 HERCULES:  Check the bolts holding my head to the ceiling and then rescue sixteen maidens from the tidal wave on the next  street car.

 GUNSIGHT:  Spanish elephant wax burns white on the evening before the arrival of the mademoiselles from the hollow butter.

 ALL IN CHORUS:  Contact lead boots.
                               Flying battering octopus.
                               Squalid macaroni battalions.

 HERCULES:  Fasten the cinches holding my spirit to that fast bandit of the starry fish. Yank three solid waves to head off  possible attacks by leaping pillars of seaweed not as to heat to the highest degree treacherous palm leaves. Marble booty is  attached to roaring dog through tenuous contact with Earth.  Question all as to peak of ivory and calm rheostats. Please the  very ground above your head. Walk on all fours indicating sublime cocktail madness. Trample six old men. With equal time to  each, offer that nun a sip of a vacant door mouse.

 WALL:  Far from weary police fragrance of terrestrial maggots lies fame and fortune. The tender capsule containing sad  reactors twists its way southward toward princely fathoms.

 HERCULES:  Cannot I ask for the loosening of many sided fire extinguisher potatoes freed from long days of nightmares and  their appropriate lapels. Wince if you must, but you cannot hide the significance of flowering mice that are so abundant in the  small croissants sold under the beaver’s belly. Now if you wish to look to your left you will notice a sight of much fish finale  and round silence.
 
(From offstage is wheeled an enormous bust of Hercules.)

 HERCULES:  Needless to say, passion overcomes my next of kin in this moment of solemn chaperones and fiery excellence.  Patchwork columns greet my fancy in the hybrid railway car we call our night. The emotion I place, garlands of refrigerator  palaces and smiling moss vessels. Operating on this premise all the time is mere folly of our most esteemed fools. Practising an  exercise of much cauliflower requires two toes and thirty violins so as not to slip into gaseous rancheros. Polish up the central  European capitals so they will shine like so many flexible nose funnels. Detach the spinning battalions of sad earring valises and  return them to their ever-present home at the bottom of the sun.

 LAMP:  There is much ammo to cool our heels at daybreak.

 GUNSIGHT:  Cantonese automobile ejaculator requires smooth porcupine lanterns on every still earthquake.

 HERCULES:  Sacks of horizontal lemon mountain passes sour the atmosphere to wit my flock of elephant cubes slides down  from the roof with all the ease of a radiator making love to a dirigible. Parked thus, a few feet off the ground, it enables us to  see things no man should see:  the terrible fling of the erect night birds, the amazing flight of the arrested handcuff, countless  bespectacled brides in armour made of sand and pitchblende, alchemists plying the sauce of the ages in small boats made of  soft hammers, posing manicurists mimicking the great marvel of panicking and lukewarm furnace buttercup savages.


 (The stage is overrun with a variety of beasts carrying false armadillos, each with its own diving board:
 -it rains milk
 -many-sided pianos are wheeled from the roof.
 -eggs hurtle from chickens into waiting cartons.
 -forty tons of fog is patted into small muffins.
 -packages are opened.
 -songs are sung.
 -Spring is given a bath and rinse off to the left.
 -the mayor eats his own telephone.


 

 (This act covers the globe and everyone's backyard in the snow)

 HERCULES:  By the gods of crying jackals and starved soup smokestack wheels, are all my helpers vanished now into that  foul smelling liquid? Paris has arrived with legions of adding machines and a torch to properly extinguish them.  Several  molecular slave ships careen through unmarked kitchens where distinguished lunches are foundering on the strawberry beach
 at noon. A mere facsimile are these xochimilco songstresses with their long headdresses of live brontosaurus locksmiths.  Panelling up their old mothers inside a live countryside full of hordes of eternal Eskimo meat greets me with a thousand fire  hydrant crumbs. Pieces of cloudy coffins merely eclipse the sandy planet which even now enters my cerebral village with a  fanfare of many sanguine chambermaids, dressed up as for the taking of roses from a dead toboggan mermaid. Toes alone do  not exclude thirsty electric parsnip submarines from practising their dog-like antics in the presence of the naked man from the  next mountain top. He is indeed the veritable nemesis of all my diatribe and DNA phenomenal squid sousaphones. Practical
 aid and lead bandages are needed to see the opening in the silky perimeter of Saturn with its ever-present wedding clowns.

 (Many fresh chessboards are by now flying about the stage)

 HERCULES:  Checking my first mate I see the ship is ready to depart for the thankless reaches of lower Switzerlandia.  Viewing once more the shores of my homeland I left for a voyage of extreme porcupine-masochists and rainy bamboo kettles.  Our first stop was to take on afresh stock of the large dinosaur eggs which I always carried in a small blue air-raid shelter on  my waist.

 HERCULES:   We were constantly being attacked by miniature toothpicks which at any moment without warning dug into
 our  very flesh, doubtless seeking shelter from the hot Swiss chocolate which covered everything. We saw them coming from
 a long way off, but mistook them for the three foot extension eyebrows we had ordered. In fact it was really a mirage of these  fair cannibals and lemon-flavoured trolley babies that we ate every last new-born herd of crowing sword swallowers.

 (A man appears on stage and ravenously eats up several shiny swords.)

 HERCULES:  Guided by the northern lights and my compass of solid marble inlaid with withered biceps and plankton  mismatch we headed for our destination, the sweet towers of leather near Tangier. Here we hoped to have our hash browned  in the summer shade while we set out to look for the key to family reunions and quartz-flavoured milkmen tanning their  immense flanks in plain view of several young plateaus.

 Luckily one of these had the very dinosaur wedges we sought and in my delerium I tripped over a pit of thrashing escalator  loaves who hadn’t seen the light of day since Caesar’s time. All too well I knew this might hopelessly endanger the flight  emerald pigeon-imitators which rolled up the eyes of Allah in every sixteenth vestibule of pure wax.  

 HERCULES:   Upon leaving this tropical splendour we set our sails for a land as bleak as the snow lying on the head of  Napoleon when he ordered his lawn mown by seventeen ravenous harpooners. Lately we’d noticed a change in Napoleon’s attitude to this trip; he had become sultry with a pinch of garlic. Fearing the worst we docked at a land so strange that even
 now immense branded plantations scour the sky for practical aids to laundry and bilious bison factories. In the hot sun we  chanced to think of ourselves as small squealing book covers lying in the eternal swamps of shoe horns and dog collars. The  Sultan greeted us with fair-weather wraps and iced bones which hung from every man’s neck as if to summon a banished  rhinoceros from the depths of stagnant and purple vaults.

 In any case, the sweet victuals wrapped in eiderdown morasses are creating new realms of magnified needles on which we can  rest our aching wrists. By cataloguing each series according to height and density, several bright ranches were discovered  sneaking behind my throat which itself had the appearance of an iceberg partially submerged in asterisks. Camouflaged as the  armies of the seven kings of Mauritius, I found peculiar groans and megaphone barking in the sunlight like tram wires who have  lost the celeste and then wrung their mothers’ phonograph handles.

 HERCULES:   Continuing our voyage, we sailed to the land of expedited energy sirens. Possibly the nicest thing about this fair  land was the bountiful supply of fresh buffalo receptacles which dotted the shore. Waves bounced off my arms and the clouds  parted to show us partial nuptials careening through fragrant antelopes. Packing a small assortment of cantaloupes and ham  hocks, we slipped into the night like a fireplace into a beetle cadaver. Caprice continued to haunt our course as we stumbled  over iridescent rafters and calm cupids. Back in the ship, mutiny was rampant with each player being worth more than a  cackle. Brusk cabbages assailed our battleship to the folly of no more than seven jackrabbits. Putrid as were the odds, another  quick violinist joined our rank odour as we marched to yet another Waterloo.