COCKY: THE OPERA (5)
By:
July 15, 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 | ACT ONE, SCENE THREE (contd.) | ACT ONE, SCENE FOUR | ACT ONE, SCENE FOUR (cont.) | & more to come.
ACT ONE
Scene Four
Scene: Night. The towpath.
Rain is hissingly falling, and three saturated foxes are paused by the black canal. Their tails droop greasily, their fur is in wet spikes, and moisture shines along their backs.
The smallest fox, made even smaller and more slender by his soaked coat, is HOLIDAY HARRY. The other two are FRANZ and COCKY.
HOLIDAY HARRY: I’ll go on alone from here, boys.
COCKY: Really, boss? Northsiders have been creeping over the bridge.
FRANZ (eagerly): We caught a couple on the towpath last week. Put ’em in the water.
HOLIDAY HARRY: Should be nice and quiet then. And I’ve got some thinking to do. (Looks around, sniffs.) The rain will keep me company.
FRANZ: You need some you time, eh boss?
Holiday Harry looks at him, and Cocky and Franz withdraw.
COCKY (exiting): “You time.” What an arselicker.
FRANZ (exiting): Fuck off Cocky.
Now Holiday Harry is alone. And as he begins to mooch along the canal, a patch of silver light reveals the du Noir brothers, Randall and Corvin, perched motionless in a dripping tree. They are watching him with great concentration. After Harry’s sung verses, the ravens tonelessly recite their rhymes.
HOLIDAY HARRY (sings): Come down rain,
falling rain,
and open up the earth’s pores.
Ghosts of old loves, old wars,
rise up in rainy redolence
and dissolve the present tense.
Old rumpings and body-dumpings,
old slashings, bashings,
and dismantlings most thorough…
Come rain, and conjure for me
the spirits of the Borough.
RANDALL and CORVIN: The owl’s in the
wood with his owly vowels.
He’s crushing a mouse in the cage of his
bowels.
A ghostly, rain-shimmery vixen half-floats across the stage. This is DARRIAN, once the super-sexy consort of Holiday Harry.
HOLIDAY HARRY: Darrian, ah Darrian,
give me comfort, give me rest.
You’re a dreamful, you’re an armful,
and you’d never do me harmful,
though I die a thousand times upon your
breast.
Our stops and starts, our lurching hearts!
The twinkle of your vixenish parts
spied through the grey-green nettle bed
quite magnetized my head.
DARRIAN: How do you feel about me now?
HOLIDAY HARRY: You are the deadest of all my darlings.
Exit DARRIAN.
CORVIN: I knew a fox who had no fear.
He isn’t here.
I knew a fox who was unsuspicious.
He’s no longer with us.
A battered hulk of a fox, with raindrops sparkling on him like shaken sequins, lumbers into view. This is RINGO, from the Northside.
HOLIDAY HARRY: A monster of a Northside
boss
approached while I was peeing.
A ruined, reeking omphalos,
he’d had enough of being.
With absolution in his eyes
and cartilage on his breath,
he fought, and then rolled over,
and I carried him to death.
RINGO (shrugging): It is what it is.
HOLIDAY HARRY: It was, it was.
Exit RINGO.
RANDALL: Hark o hark to the vixen’s
bark —
at the edge of the dark lives a darker dark.
Harry goes to the edge of the canal, and peers in.
HOLIDAY HARRY: This old canal, this water
unflowing,
turned inky black from too much knowing,
too many drowned bicycles, drowned
bones,
death-mosses, soggy dogs, drowned
phones,
coathangers and clumps of narcotic kelp
for when you’re beyond all help.
He turns to the audience.
Should I jump in? Should I?
What d’you think?
RANDALL: I’m loving this mood he’s in.
CORVIN: Me too.
RANDALL and CORVIN: The owl’s in the
wood with his owly vowels.
He’s crushing a mouse in the cage of his
bowels.
To be continued…
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.