COCKY: THE OPERA (1)

By: James Parker
March 12, 2025

An excerpt from a musical in progress, which takes as its source material the author’s swearing-animal epic The Ballad of Cocky the Fox, serialized here at HILOBROW 2010–11. Opera installments illustrated by Kristin Parker.

COCKY: THE OPERA: PRELUDE & ACT ONE, SCENE ONE | TBD.

*

Prelude

Darkness.

We hear a sound, or the beginnings of a sound, or the beginning of sound itself. A deep floor-of-the-universe metallic drone. A mega-chord from the crack of time, with infinite sustain. At first it is quiet and strangely soothing, there-but-not-there. As the scene progresses it builds slowly and irresistibly.

From the dark – voices.

RANDALL: Are you there, brother?

CORVIN: Where else am I gonna be, brother?

RANDALL: Let’s begin.

Then: light.

Against a background of shifting oranges and reds, like an especially inflamed and bottomless sunset, a tree is silhouetted. An oak tree: bare, black and ancient, almost abstract-looking, with scorched and twisted limbs.

In its branches sit two ravens. On the upper right is Randall du Noir, on the lower left is his brother Corvin. They sit there motionless, in an attitude of cracked symmetry. Their heads are turned to the side: their beaks are pointing at each other.

This is Barbecue Towers: home of the ravens.

The background softens, changes, becomes a swirling silvery vagueness. Spotlights pick out the two ravens, who now turn towards us. Randall is revealed as a glossy and well-conditioned specimen, elegant in his movements. Corvin is humped, shabby, bobbing mechanically on his branch. Randall has a posh and gently malevolent purr of a voice. Corvin is croakier and more spluttery.

CORVIN (to the audience): You’ll like this number. It’s a grower.

RANDALL: Mine is the upper branch, his the lower.
I am suave and blue-black and rhetorical.

CORVIN: And I’m all horrible horrible.

RANDALL: He speaks in spikes. He gets no likes.

CORVIN: I puke when inspiration strikes.

RANDALL: But we have a single tale to tell.

CORVIN: This is the story of –

TOGETHER: HOW WE FELL.

The light changes again, to suggest bottomless depth, a pregnant dimness receding eternally: the Void. The Great Dismalia. The ravens spread their wings, rise slowly from the tree and begin to circulate through this vacancy.

RANDALL (grandly): Once in a glorious gloom we reigned,
in single raven-mind conjoined.
Brother to brother, wing to wing,
in nothingness delighting.

CORVIN: Nothing had happened,
no word uttered,
nothing was there
and nothing mattered.

RANDALL: Wing to wing, bedmates, cloudmates,
we plied the vacant straits,
patrolling in spirals from gloom to gloom…

CORVIN: Fuck me. We had so much room.

RANDALL: Now I’d have him next to me,
and now, as far as far,
between two spheres of emptiness,
he’d tremble like a star.

CORVIN (in awe): Such a poet you are.

The drone is louder now. The ravens are obliged to raise their voices. From one side of the swirly greyness, like light under a door, comes a different shade, a warmth.

RANDALL: Then came a shuffle, a rumble, a twinge,
a pressure of light at the chasm’s hinge.

CORVIN: First it was nausea. Then it was noise.

RANDALL: Powerchord pressure bent the void.
A sheer outcurving wall of drone
advanced upon our zone.

CORVIN: Weren’t we a pair of worried birds!
What’s happening? we said.

RANDALL: Our very first words.
And lo, we were blown from our cloudy bluff
by a toppling horror-wave of…

CORVIN (shouting): STUFF

A squawk of feedback, and the drone resumes, still louder. Points of light – stars, planets, comets, spaceships, planes – begin to pop out of the background.

RANDALL (also shouting): I for all my suavity
got tangled up in gravity.
Nor could Corvin the great curve outclimb.
We fell, and bulged the net of Time.

Whooshings of descent. The ravens twirl helplessly in space.

CORVIN: Down shivery chutes we fell.
Fucking HELL.

TOGETHER (singing):
Down shivery chutes we fell (we fell)
our wings made a burning smell (-ning smell)
Our beaks went black
and our eyeballs cracked
and our brains began to swell (to swell)

CORVIN (singing alone): Up rickety rods we rose (we rose)
then came back down, I suppose (suppose)
A vixen barked
and it left a mark
in a place that nobody knows (-dy knows)

RANDALL: Pulled down, pulled down, pulled down
into the streaky brightness of the town!

CORVIN: Everything was just beginning
but for us it was… THE END.

The drone cuts out. Sounds of uproar, car horns, dogs barking, as the ravens somersault through chaos and then flumpily crashland. They are sprawling on the stage.

CORVIN (dejected): Down terrible tubes… Appalling pipes?…

RANDALL: Expelled from the immeasurable gloam
of the pre-universe
(which was our home)
we landed with a feathery splat and a curse.

CORVIN (retching as he declaims his curse):
Fuck the unmade bed of the sky!
Fuck the frozen shadow!
Fuck the dying squawk of light
that crosses the lonely meadow!

RANDALL: More please.

CORVIN: Fuck the face in empty space!
Fuck the broken weather!
Fuck the rhyme, the sacred slime
that sticks the words together!

RANDALL: And a little more.

CORVIN: Put the clouds on a slow boil!
Leave the moon out all day, let it spoil!
Everyone’s scared of our wood.

RANDALL: Good.

(Corvin vomits.)

RANDALL: Better every time I hear it. (Sighs.)

They hop up into their tree, and onto their respective branches.

CORVIN (rubbing his head): Something clipped me on the way down, brother.

RANDALL: I saw a fridge, twirling in a funnel of freefall.

CORVIN: I saw a shopping cart.

RANDALL: I saw a jet engine, still screaming.

CORVIN (moans): My head’s killing me.

RANDALL: Poor Corvin.

CORVIN: Poor Corvin.

RANDALL: Nevertheless – here we are.

CORVIN: Fox piss and nettles and rusty kettles

RANDALL: We made a home in this blasted oak.

CORVIN: Barbecue Towers.

RANDALL: Our little joke.
And now, seigneurially bored,
of these wet woods and roads I am the drawling overlord.

CORVIN: And I like bouncing on the spot.
And the taste of rot.

The light cuts out. Darkness.

RANDALL (in the dark): Now then.

CORVIN: Now what?

RANDALL: We must amuse ourselves.

CORVIN: Yup.

RANDALL: Shall we see what’s happening in the Borough?

Act One

Scene One

Night. The Dump. A junkyard in the Borough, with car parts littered around: here a carburetor, there a steering wheel. Three vixens are mid-conversation. Their talk fades in.

CELESTE: …so I said, well, you’re welcome to try. You know? Fucking do it. Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough.

DARRIAN: Foxes, eh? Such poofs, in the end.

[A pause]

NORA: Right. Bugger this. I’m off to the Northside.

DARRIAN: The Northside?

CELESTE: For what, Nora?

NORA: What have we just been talking about, Celeste? For a hump. For a bloody good rumping, long overdue.

CELESTE: Ah Nora. Nora Nora Nora.

NORA: Well I can’t get one round here, can I? Foxes won’t look at me.

DARRIAN: Well yeah. Out of respect for Cocky.

NORA: Respect for Cocky. That’s a laugh. Cocky the fox, right now, could not fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

CELESTE: Your Cocky?

NORA: He’s a wreck! Drinking mouthwash, lying about, talking gibberish all night to that idiot rabbit.

DARRIAN: Still got the reputation though, hasn’t he? The Cocky legend. “Tastiest in the Borough.” Sexy fucker too.

NORA: He’s useless Darrian, I’m telling you. Useless in all departments. Ever since I kicked him out of the den.

CELESTE: Seriously?

NORA: A shadow of his former self. And if I don’t get a hump soon – [snarls, lunges, as if tearing at an invisible fox. Celeste and Darrian are amused. Talk fades out.]

Light dims over the vixens.

CORVIN (from his branch): Randy vixens. Naughty naughty.

RANDALL (from his): It’s the fever of the season. (to the audience) January: humping is all, and boundaries are forgotten. A raw weight of winter presses down on the Borough, on the squirrels trembling in the park, on the back gardens crispy with frost, on the leaky woods overlooking the Safeway carpark, on the canal towpath where the fishermen sit shapelessly on their bait-buckets, on the railside jungles, on the rubbishy no-places and the urinous underspaces and the juicy, ratty bins behind the kebab shop… And every fox and vixen is obsessed with sex.

CORVIN: Sex, sex, sex.

RANDALL: Young ones, old ones, all obsessed. Famished faces thrusting through wet bushes. Rageful, shearing screams in the cold air. Squabblings and rushings, molestations, and a wild taking of chances across rain-shiny roads.

CORVIN: Foxes get in fixes
when they follow their little prickses.

RANDALL: Three dead by car this week alone.

CORVIN: We’ll carry on getting our carrion. (Laughs coughingly and horribly.)

Light comes up over the vixens.

CELESTE: A quickie on the Northside, eh… You know they’re proper brutes over there.

NORA: So?

DARRIAN: Dirty too. Contagious. What if you get a disease.

NORA: That’s all rubbish. Stuff you tell cubs.

DARRIAN: Billy won’t like it.

NORA: Balls to Billy. He’s not my Boss. Holiday Harry was my Boss, and he’s dead.

CELESTE: What if it’s amazing. I mean what if you find a big rough fox who really knows what he’s doing.

NORA: Four legs and a pair of bollocks, that’s all I need.

CELESTE: Haha and no chit-chat, right? Not blabbering away all the time like these Borough types… Vixens, come and get it… How does it go?

NORA: Vixens, come and get it on the Northside.
The cocks are thicker.

CELESTE (joining in): The shagging’s quicker! Haha fantastic yeah. You know what, this could be great, Nora. You’re doing this for you.

DARRIAN: Well I think you’re mad. We’re Borough vixens aren’t we, and we shag Borough foxes. We don’t cross the canal.

NORA: Come on Darrian.

DARRIAN: What?

NORA: Can’t you feel it? I know you can feel it.

DARRIAN: Feel what?

NORA: It. Right in your fucking womb.

DARRIAN: Nora what are you talking about?

NORA: Listen…

(sings) There are various
multifarious ways
for a vixen to meet her end –
by poison or shock
or a fatal knock
or a going around the bend.

CELESTE:
By climate change
or sarcoptic mange
a vixen is got rid of.

NORA: But where is the song
of the vixens
who perish for lack of love?

NORA AND CELESTE:
Vixens are lonely.
Vixens are sad.
Vixens are slowly
go-ing mad.

DARRIAN: Hm. You’re actually not wrong about that.

CELESTE:
A dog can rip her.
A van can clip her.
A rat can get into her food.
An empty bin
can put her in
a suicidal mood.

NORA:
But her real appetite
is a scream in the night.
It’s the sound of a cosmic breach.
It’s the hole in her heart,
the pain in the part
that only the right fox can reach.

DARRIAN (to the audience): You know what, I’m really starting to relate to this.

NORA AND CELESTE:
Vixens are lonely.
Vixens are sad.
Vixens are slowly
go-ing mad.

ALL THREE TOGETHER:
We want to be ravished.
We want to be thrilled.
We’d like to feel something
before we get killed.
Foxes, attend to your vixens because
your vixens are unfulfilled.

NORA (departing):
Is there a fox who’s strong enough,
a fox who can go long enough,
is there a fox who’s wrong enough for me?

CELESTE AND DARRIAN:
Vixens are lonely.
Vixens are sad.
Vixens are slowly
go-ing mad.

NORA: Anyone looking for me, tell ’em I’ve gone into town to turn over a new bin.

Nora leaves. Celeste and Darrian exchange looks.

Lights down over the two vixens. Lights up over Barbecue Towers.

RANDALL: This is very promising, brother. Very promising. This is why we love foxes, isn’t it?

CORVIN: Always on the move yeah. Not like farty old badgers.

RANDALL: Creatures of narrative. Always starting something.

CORVIN: There’s no vaccine for the vixen
who lets one of those Northside pricks in.

RANDALL: Indeed. (To the audience.) Ladies and gentlemen, we shall keep our raven eye on Nora.

***

MORE PARKER at HILOBROW: COCKY THE FOX: a brilliant swearing-animal epic, serialized here at HILOBROW from 2010–2011, inc. a newsletter by Patrick Cates | THE KALEVALA — a Finnish epic, bastardized | THE BOURNE VARIATIONS: A series of poems about the Jason Bourne movies | ANGUSONICS: James and Tommy Valicenti parse Angus Young’s solos | MOULDIANA: James and Tommy Valicenti parse Bob Mould’s solos | BOLANOMICS: James traces Marc Bolan’s musical and philosophical development | WINDS OF MAGIC: A curated series reprinting James’s early- and mid-2000s writing for the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix | CROM YOUR ENTHUSIASM: J.R.R. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT | EVEN MORE PARKER, including doggerel; HiLo Hero items on Sid Vicious, Dez Cadena, Mervyn Peake, others; and more.