Great Monologues

Police. Charges. Arraignment. Lawyers. Money. Time. Judge. Jury. Proof. His word against mine. Defendant’s attorney — a three-piece button down summa cum laude fresh from Harvard fuck-off: Did my client rape you? No. Assault you? Yes. How? With a pillow. Did you resist? Yes. Evidence? None. Witnesses? None. Did you tie him up? beat him? lock him in a fireplace? Six months for me, that animal goes free. And if I survive being locked up, then what do I do? Come home and lock myself up. Chainlock, boltlock, deadlock. And wait for him. Hear him in every creak of wood, every mouse in the wall, every twig tapping on the window. Start from sleep, 4 A.M. see something in the dark at the foot of my bed. He’s not there. This time. So then what do I do? Wait for him? Or move three thousand miles, change my name, unlist my phone, get a dog. I don’t want to taste my vomit everytime the doorbell rings. I don’t want to flinch when a man touches me. I won’t wear a goddamn whistle. I want to live my life. He’s never leaving this house.

C:

His body was….well, it was thin, but hard; all sinew and muscle; he fenced he told me, and he was the one with the megaphone on the crew. When I held him when we danced, there was only sinew and muscle. We dated a lot; I liked him; I didn’t tell Mother, but I liked him a lot I like him, Sis, I said; I really like him. Has he…?….you know. No, I said; no, he hasn’t. But then he did. We were dancing-slowly-late, the end of the evening, and we danced so close, all…pressed,…and we were pressed, and I could feel that he was hard, that muscle and sinew,pressed against me while we danced. We were the same height and he looked into my eyes as we danced, slowly, and I felt the pressure up against me, and he tensed it and I felt it move against me. Whatever is that, I said, I knew but whatever is that, I said, and he smiled and his eyes shone, and it’s me in love with you, he said. 

Henrietta Iscariot: 

  No parent should have to bury a child… No mother should have to bury a son. Mothers are not meant to bury sons. It is not in the natural order of things. 
  I buried my son. In a potter’s field. In a field of Blood. In empty, acrid silence. There was no funeral. There were no mourners. His friends all absent. His father dead. His sisters refusing to attend. I discovered his body alone, I dug his grave alone, I placed him in a hole, and covered him with dirt and rock alone. I was not able to finish burying him before sundown, and I’m not sure if that affected his fate…..
  I begrudge God none of this…I do not curse him or bemoan my lot. And though my heart keeps beating only to keep breaking - I do not question why.  
  I remember the moment my son was born as if it was yesterday. The moment the midwife placed him in my arms, I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding. I remember holding my son, and looking over at my own mother, and saying, “Now I understand why the sun comes up at day and the stars come out at night. I understand why the rain falls gently. Now I understand you Mother”…
  I loved my son everyday of his life, and I will love him ferociously long after I’ve stopped breathing. I am a simple woman. I am not bright or learn-ed. I do not read. I do not write. My opinions are not solicited. My voice is not important….
 On the day of my son’s birth I was infused with a love beyond all measure and understanding…The world tells me that God is in Heaven and that my son is in Hell. I tell the world the one true thing I know: If my son is in Hell, then there is no Heaven- because if my son sits in Hell, there is no God.  

Do you remember what Mother said when she burst into the room? “Alma has fallen in love with that tall boy!” It’s true I had, but longer ago than that. I’ve lived next door to you all the days of my life, a weak and divided person, lived in your shadow, no, I mean your brightness: which made a shadow I lived in, but lived in adoring awe of you radience, your strength, your singleness. Now Father tells me I am becoming known as an eccentric. People think me affected, laugh at me, imitate me at parties! I’m marked to be different. It’s stamped on me in big letters so people can read from a distance, “This Person is Strange”…Well I may be eccentric but not so eccentric that I don’t have the ordinary human need for love. I have that need, and I must satisfy it in whatever way my good or bad fortune will make possible for me. 

Ghost:

We are starving, we will not stand this no longer. Rather than starve we are torment to set you on fire. You bloody farmers could not live if it was not for the poor, tis them that keep you bloody rascals alive, but there will be a slaughter made amongst you very soon. I should very well like to hang you the way I hanged your beasts. You bloody rogue, I will light up a little fire for you the first opportunity I can make. I been working in this field a hundred and fifty years. There ain’t twenty in this parish but what hates you, bullhead. I live in your house. I watch television with you. I stand beside your chair and watch the killings. I watch the food and I watch what makes people laugh. My baby died starving. 

Marisol:

I’m killed instantly. Little blazing lead meteors enter my body. My blood cells ride those bullets into outer space. My soul surges up the oceans of the Milky Way at the speed of light. At the moment of death, I see the invisible war. Thousands of years of fighting past in an instant. New and terrible forms of warfare, monstreous weapons and unimagined strains of terror are created and destroyed in billionths of a second. Galaxies spring from a single drop of angels sweat while hundreds of armies fight and die on the fingertips of children in the Bronx. Then, as if one body, one mind, the innocent of the earth take to the streets with anything they can find, - rocks, sticks, screams- and aim their displeasure at the senile sky and fire into the tattered wind on the sides of the angels…billions of poor, of homeless, of peaceful, of silent, of angry…fighting and fighting as no species has ever fought before. Inspired by the earthly noise, the rebels advance! New ideas rip the heavens.New powers are created. New miracles are signed into law. It’s the first day of the new history. Oh God. What light. What possibilities. What hope.

Lenny:

I’m an accomplished sculptor, Marisol. Before that I was a Life and Growth Empowerment Practitioner. Before that I worked for the Brooklyn Spiritual Emergence Network. This one’s call “Marisol Perez”. The nails symbolize everything I know about you. Spaces between the nails are everything I don’t know about you. As you can see, you’re a great mystery. No one else is working like this. It’s totally new. But it’s a small step in my career. I’m going to need a lot more money if I ever want to get past this point.  

Angel:

I kick-started your heart, Marisol. I wired your nervous system. I pushed your fetal blood in the right direction and turned the foam in your infant lungs to oxygen. When you were six and your parents were fighting, I helped you pretend you were underwater; that you were a cold-blooded fish, in the bottom of the black ocean, far away and safe. When racists ran you out of school at ten, screaming, I turned the monsters into little columns of salt! At last count, one plane crash, one collapsed elevator, one massacre at the hands of a right-wing fanatic with an Uzi, and sixty-six-thousand-six-hundred-and-three separate sexual assaults never happened because of me. Now the bad news.
I can’t expect you to understand the political ins and outs of what’s going on. But you have eyes. You asked me questions about children and water and war and the moon: the same questions I’ve been asking myself for a thousand years.
The universal body is sick, Marisol. Constellations are wasting away, the nauseous stars are full of blisters and sores, the infected earth is running a temperature, and everywhere the universal mind is wracked with amnesia, boredom, and neurotic obsessions. Because God is old and dying and taking the rest of us with Him. and for too long, much too long, I’ve been looking the other way. Trying to stop the massive hemorrhage with my little hands, with my prayers. But it didn’t work and I knew if I didn’t do something soon, it would be too late. I called a meeting. And I urged the Heavenly Hierarchies—the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Archangels and Angels—to vote to stop the universal ruin…by slaughtering our senile God. And they did. Listen well, Marisol: angels are going to kill the King of Heaven and restore the vitality of the universe with His blood. And I’m going to lead them.

Elizabeth:

Am I dead?

Is hell Clervell chattering on and on?

Did I never get to lie beneath you,

In the high grass, in the heat of the day, 

and feel the slick of your skin, 

and taste your mouth, and hear you whisper, 

hot in my ear,”Don’t move!- 

Stay still,so very still, and if you buck

and I slip deeper inside you

I am gone” -and I want that,

both of us, into each other,

exploding, so I do buck-

and we both cry out,

on the edge, falling into ourselves, 

and a light streams out of us. 

Anna:

I should have come with you. God, as soon as I think I’m out of there some relatives drive me back to the house. The place is mobbed. I’m dragged through everybody eating and drinking and talking, to some little back bedroom, with all the aunts and cousins, with the women, right? I’m trying to tell them how I’ve got to get a bus back to civilization. So then it’s midnight and the last bus has left at ten, which they know, I’m sure, damn them, and I hadn’t checked, like an idiot. So I have to spend the night in Robbie’s little nephew’s room in the attic. The little redhead did you see him? He’s been collecting butterflies all day, and they’re pinned around the room to the walls –a pin in each wing, right? So I get to sleep by about two, I’ve got them to promise to get me up at six-thirty for the seven something bus. I wake up, it’s not quite light, really; you can’t see in the room much – but there’s something in there. There’s this intermittent soft flutter sound. I think what the hell is –Larry, the –oh Lord, the walls are just pulsating. All those butterflies are alive. They’re all beating their bodies against the wall, all around me. The kid’s put them in alcohol; and he’d thought he’d killed them, they’d only passed out. I started screaming hysterically. I got the bed sheet around me and ran down to the kitchen.; I’ve never felt so naked in my life. This glowering older brother had to go get my clothes, unpinned the butterflies, if they lived, I got the whispering sister to drop me off at the bus station; they were glad to get rid of me.