COCKY: THE OPERA (3)
By:
May 11, 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 from 2010–11; it was published in book form in 2011. Opera installments illustrated by Kristin Parker.
COCKY: THE OPERA: PRELUDE & ACT ONE, SCENE ONE | ACT ONE, SCENE TWO | ACT ONE, SCENE THREE | & more to come.
ACT ONE
Scene Three
A small back garden at dawn: the sun slowly rising, the light slowly clarifying.
In the centre of the stage is a wire-fronted wooden hutch, the door open and lolling off its hinges.
Inside the hutch, on a bed of churned straw, is large and very anxious-looking white rabbit. This is Champion.
On top of the hutch, on his back, asleep, mouth open, is a fox. This is Cocky.
He snores once, enormously.
Two vixens and two foxes dance mincingly and at high speed from one side of the stage to the other. This is the Chorus.
CHORUS: Aren’t you concerned about
Cocky the fox?
He’s acting a bit unorthodox.
We hear another huge snoring sound, and then a honking worried voice, abrupt as a fire alarm.
CHAMPION: COCKY COCKY COCKY!
COCKY (roused, confused): What? What’s happening?
CHAMPION: Snappy new day?
COCKY: What?!
CHAMPION: Snappy new day?
Pause. Cocky appears to have fallen back asleep.
CHAMPION: Snappy new day?
Pause.
Sna—
COCKY (interrupting): YES it’s a fucking snappy new day. Fuck!
CHAMPION: Quavers?
COCKY: What?
CHAMPION: Got my Quavers?
COCKY: No I haven’t got your bloody Quavers! I got you a carrot. (Sits up. Looks about him blearily.) Somewhere round here…
CHAMPION: Haven’t got my Quavers?
COCKY: A nice carrot, for fuck’s sake. (He finds the carrot and waggles it in Champion’s face.) Don’t rabbits like carrots?
CHAMPION: Champion likes Quavers.
Cocky groans, subsides. He reaches for his large plastic bottle of Listerine, and takes a belt of the vicious blue-green liquid. Then he takes another one. His mood begins to change.
COCKY: Ah. (clears throat violently) Aha! That’s better.
He sighs deeply and contentedly.
The Chorus dances frenziedly across the stage again.
CHORUS: Aren’t you concerned about his
habits?
The bottles of mouthwash, the big white
rabbits?
COCKY (wonderfully mellow): I shouldn’t be so grumpy. This is the true friend of my bachelorhood.
CHAMPION: The what?
COCKY: My friend! My greatest friend! Since I entered this new… phase of life. (Mood darkens) Since she kicked me out.
(sings)
For the recreational drugging
and the glug glug glugging
my vixen did expel me.
I was too loud, I was too twitchy —
plus other failings about which she
did not neglect to tell me.
He looks around sadly, taking in the scene.
And it it’s all still here.
No, it didn’t disappear.
CHORUS: You’re awake.
COCKY: Apparently I’m me again,
and I’m obliged to BE again.
CHORUS: Awake!
COCKY: The taste of me, the waste of me,
the problems never faced of me.
the energy displaced of me…
CHORUS: Cocky, you are bleeding well
AWAKE!
COCKY: I’m all scratched up. Did I fight
someone?
Fur in my teeth. Did I bite someone?
There’s a tang on my tongue like the gristle
of a thistle.
(hawks and spits)
Here. Let me wet my whistle.
He takes another glug of Listerine.
Enter WEASEL PAUL, a careworn middle-aged weasel, with a bag of Quavers. He tosses the bag into Champion’s hutch.
COCKY (with a belch): Nice one, Weez.
CHAMPION (attacking the bag with gusto): Thank you Weasel Paul!
WEASEL PAUL: You’re welcome. Cocky we need to talk.
COCKY sighs vastly.
WEASEL PAUL: You know we need to talk.
COCKY: Go on then.
Lights out.
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.