Excerpts from

THE BIOSPHERIA LIBRETTO

by

Coco McPherson
Billy Lux
Cynthia Farar Nancy
Reilly-Mcvittie
Constance Penley
& Gil Bios


CHORUS

First of all he came into the inert world.
From mineral he developed into the realm of vegetable.
For years he lived thus.
Then he passed into an animal state, yet bereft of any memory of his being vegetable - except for his attraction to Spring and to blossoms.

From realm to realm man went, reaching his present reasoning,
knowledgeable,
robust state;
forgetting earlier forms of intelligence.

So, too shall he pass beyond the current form of perception.
There are a thousand other forms of Mind.
- Rumi

ADELAIDE

How different the names are now. Even my own seems strange and new.

PART III.

ADELAIDE

Will: Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second while sound travels at approximately 1100 ft. per second. This is probably why I saw the glint on your spiked necklace before I heard your footsteps. I liked lying in the grass with you today, staring at the chemical sky. It was so nice; I could almost hear the subway roaring under my back. I have to say that I am very happy here.

GIL

Squatting in a rock pool I suddenly remember.
Dark.
Dawn.
I've the chills.
I'm in Connecticut waiting for the bus to take me to school.
The temperature is way below zero.
I'm a stool pigeon.
I'm a lightweight in a blue parka.
I have no thoughts.
There are three frozen girls scattered around me. They have no thoughts either.
We are hoping the bus will come or that it won't come.
We have no thoughts.

SAMANTHA

Oddly, the dome is littered with low-tech devices. Like the bread crumbs I found making a snake-line from the kitchen to the marsh, already crunchy but still intact due to the sickly state of our birds. Poor staggering things. Walking alongside the crumbs I thought up a few more nursery rhymes/bedtime stories, which I have taken up in a big and silent and secretive way, for self-amusement before hitting the sack.

WILL

I wish I could write poetry, but I can't. A few years back, I was a hanger-on to a famous poet. I wanted to try and figure out how the poetry came out of him. It had everything to do with his dead mother and nothing to do with me. Eventually he grew bored with me. I wouldn't put out, so he wouldn't put up. He's an old bear but still randy. He found a cub that likes to shoot speed and stroke soft cock for three days without interruption. I tried that once when I was 20, then went right back to downing Quaaludes.

KD

FARM YIELD
Yeah, well back to the food for thought. The letters for the food came out today, lined up in the alphabet that is helpless without code. Waiting to be harvested round the zeros and ones, it was as usual slightly ironic in this day's agelessness to see a field of robotically printed letters splice into food descriptions like: corndogs, grinapples, lined up next to squashfingers, and riceflakes, there were orangezooms, and bananasnares. The wheatholes were hard to keep from going off, but I think the refridgeration of incomprehension will separate the circles from the holes. It all came off pretty easy.

Code mode... I wish I could shake off the ellipitcal, recursive curve of alphabetic, food mongering clusters and write about dancing by the light of the paper moon.

ADELAIDE

I've been wearing other peoples' underpants because mine are all dirty. I finally call to order new ones and the conversation goes like this:

Me: I'd like 2 pairs of red sparkle string bikini underpants, 100% cotton
"jennifer": OK, how many and in what color?
Me: red, sparkle ...two pair
"jennifer": what color would you like that in?
Me: red, sparkle...
"jennifer": OK, I have those, two pair. Sparkle. What color sparkle?
etcetera

Then I order $200 worth of sweaters, promising to pay when we get out...

DIXIE

So much work. It never ends. I'm numb with exhaustion. No interior life, no space for being creative. And I miss music. We're going to have to start making it ourselves now that the goats ate the sound system. I wish the Boy Mechanic hadn't disappeared on us like that. If he were here, he'd make a flute from PVC piping or a xylophone from a bunch of wrenches.

GIL

Uzbekistan has 22.8 million people.
Syria has 71,500 square miles.
The capital of Belarus is Minsk.
Antarctica is the highest continent.
Pakistan produces more than 36 million square yards of woven cloth annually.
Costa Rica is a multi-party republic.
Over 80% of Surinam is covered by tropical rain forest.
The shores of the Dead Sea are the lowest land on the Earth's surface, 1,286 feet below sea level.
Lake Maracaibo is not a true lake, but a shallow inlet of the Caribbean Sea. It is the main source of Venezuela's oil.
The life expectancy in North Korea is 55 years.
Ohio is the Buckeye State.
I need to get laid.
I'm not 60, but I feel like I'm 60. I'm getting old quickly here. Did they have sex on Mir? I saw two pug-nosed Ugandan squirrels mating in the savannah yesterday. I observed them for some time.

ADELAIDE

Sitting far off in the grasses, the ones I'm supposed to be studying and which I've clearly tamed as some kind of lawn, I do nothing but read, stroke the male anteater, and think about time in the theater.