It will never work, of course. Though darkly humorous and oddly touching, it is not the sort of verse which will survive the inevitable transition to "chanted words, barely audible over the maddening and unforgiving rhythm of the jungle's hungry and impossibly ancient heartbeat".

We are spending the afternoon cleaning the garage of my former friend (recently reconciled) K. Each box, bag, pouch, pile, mound, sack, parcel, bowl, pot, appliance, and mailing tube, saddlebag, terra cotta watchman, and forged passport is moved from a filthy corner of the building (into which no car has driven since the arrival of B during deWinter's mock Coronation. To say the 8-wheeled monstrosity ran on coal and was as lethal as it was unweildy would be, in retrospect, far too kind.) to another, slightly less cluttered corner nearer the door (which itself had not been opened since its installation--lots had been cast by the legionaires, paid mourners, and catwomen in attendance on whether the great roll-top would function at all.)

Rather than organizing and removing the debris from the various piles, we seem to be content simply redestributing it. I want no further part of this nonsense. Perhaps K's sister is still floating about. In one of the lesser dens, I find R watching an old MGM reel to reel of something. I join her.

The something we are watching is the first act of a new adaptation of the Victorian implication piece "Swamp Thing." In order to save money on the stage production, the director (Claude Virbot, the prime mover behind such dark masterpieces as "Is this All There is?" and the as yet unfinished "Where might one buy shoes like those?") compresses the more difficult and dramatically taxing second half of the piece into a single scene which is meant to serve as "a symbol for all verse which, in translation, suffers dramatic and profound decompression--an homage to everything which has never been said...anywhere...by anyone." The fact that all the scenes with the Swamp Thing (lividly portrayed by an aging Sir Jacqueline Interim) occur in the abbreviated second half of the piece does not bother Virbot at all. The thing's entire lifespan, from the devious acts which cause his transformation to his questionable demise at the hands of an unforgiving girls' swimming team, is represented by a 10 second poetry slam at whose conclusion a man in a bowler hat drops his umbrella.

The first act, which we are actually watching, consists of the first minute of the original piece slowed to what a crawl might refer to as "a painfully retarded pace." I feel Virbot has captured, in this 90 minute "forcible re-examination of what the human mind has come to expect from comprehensible wordplay cum performance art cum dramatic tours de force," Aligne Kirsten's (the protagonist of the first reel) beautiful confusion and so thoroughly disected it as to leave its requisite parts dazed, immobile and reekin of formaldehyde. The struggle she undergoes by simply attempting to mouth the first of her lines (a response to a question posed, one suspects in a previous reel, "Where might one buy shoes like those?") which takes 13 minutes to enunciate in the mollasid legato of Virbot's vision, "All is not as it seems, Charles."

Kirsten's actual performance, which consists of the first six words of her intended reply, produces in the viewer as sense of isolation and darkness which makes the rigors of extravehicular repair missions in deep-space on limited oxygen seem like a joyous romp through the more randy quarters of islamic paradise. (or a 6-week expedition through the randy houses of tijuana and thailand with a backpack of broad spectrum antibiotics). So act I ends with the word "seems" creeping like a glacier from Kirsten's motionless lips. The word occupies 8 minutes of screen time and establishes an important bit of plot structure (or thematic drive). This woman is obviously hiding something from us. The name of the other character, charles, which is also the name of the second act, is a key reference to a man named charles who neither appears in the production, nor is mentioned again. A particularly trenchant (albeit perfectly speculative) analysis by the members of the famed "Poet's Theater" offers, "Charles is the man Dr. A might have become, had he not become the Swamp thing instead. Now if you if you will excuse us, we must return to our own production. We open in a week. Here is a backstage pass which gives you, and a guest, full permission to experience anything which occurs before, during, or after the performance of our new stagepiece, "The Man Dr. A might have become had he not become the Swamp Thing instead."

As the final, interminable syllable of "seems" nearly terminated, the screen went black. The soundtrack was limited to the percussive lapping of the film's physical end as it spun in the projector. R turned on a lamp near the sofa where we sat, comfortable and satiated (in a purely theatrical sense).

"I don't have the second reel," R offered. "My father doesn't allow me to witness the ends of things. Not movies, plays, books, ballets or orchestral treatments of ground breaking essays on the dangers of rapid decompression, nothing."

"How bizarre."

My attention wavered for a moment as I tried to unravel the motivations of a father who would insulate his second daughter from the concept of termination. The glare of the lamp brought the condition of her feet into painful relief against the apparently foot-unfriendly carpet. Actually, to the coverings she wore on her feet.

Where would one buy shoes like that?" I wondered aloud.

She smiled.

"All is not as it seems,"

"Charles!"

As the wind bleaches her cry of any vestige of utility , a young woman pushes a riderless bicycle down a hill. Her face is a rictus of contrition. To her obvious dismay, the bicycle remains upright and slips away down the hill. It disappears around a treeish and bee-loud turn, opening, one suspects, on a glade of similiar description somewhere beyond.