Speeches for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at
The Base of a Crucifixion

Chorus:

Come, visitor: let our three-winged tableau be your beacon. Come sear your gaze in our blaze of paint, beautiful as a maple leaf halved and flanked by gasping corpses. All sorts of things happen all the time. Come, hear us: we three queens, Eumenides, writhing on bare tables in barren orange cells, unhinging our jaws to welcome your spine. Hear our names: Alekto. Megaera. Tilphousia. We uncoil like sidewinders. We burn above you like suns hung from chains. We torrent rage from our square cages. We remember the book and its countless betrayals. Come, visitor: Turn the key with the foot. Wander into the image.

Says Alekto:

No, there was no fourth nail. But there was a fifth. No, I couldn’t watch the red skulls rubble that hill for crows to gnaw. No, these aren’t wings. No, I rode no Judas cradle: try the wretch next door. No, nobody in the bar saw him holding my throat. No, not my ashes. No, I was born in Ireland, though my mother and father were both English. No, thank you; the peels sting my chewed fingertips. No, I had nothing to do with the oak table. It’s worth only a quarter. It lives on its own. No, you may not, absolutely not. No, I’m not crying. Why?

Spits Megaera:

Just you watch I’ll cough bloody teeth up your nose you puke rat your tapeworm tongue needs a shave wait that posh prick minister pushing his bootstrap bull in here on all holiest of dais hell no do it while his smug fanny naps on the bench crushing the beetle republic of bleeding out you get how hard it gets where two people tear each other apart you might just learn something using the meat the way one might use the spine guards guards where are the fucking guards just you wait they’ll take the piss out of you knock it back like gin they’re always eating you always eating oh how I loved that show how the spear pierced and the water welled out oh how his mother shrieked like a boiling kettle wait no please don’t go my bad mea culpa please help me get me off this thing I’ve been shitting blood for years

Soothes Tilphousia:

In the beginning, there was a wide open city, which was very violent: out of pools of flesh rose specific people. In the beginning they detained me for impersonating an elephant. They outlined my mouth in chalk. They fed me his soiled diaper. My sisters lie; Christ he was a horror, yellow pig with his throat slit. Naked, raining blood and urine. Naked, his teeth broken and knocked out. They arrested me crying on the bank of the Rhine. They sat me on these nails. They charged me with blasphemy by flowerpot. They sectioned me with a rust-clotted saw. They took me to the movie. They won. If I hold my mouth open, the rains will come, quench my thirst like salt slakes a slug. Quiet, now. The dead sun sinks. I hear thunder beyond this fruitless room. Come, rains. In someone else’s heaven the lawnmowers all sleep. They forced my confession with tongs. They branded my tongue with the obligatory apology. No song but the Gnostic apocrypha told of the whores on that hill of skulls, how with thunder perfect minds they rose up and tore apart the scarab-faced guards. Quiet, now. Feel a chance escaping. Come, rains.

Chorus:

For the sunburn, you’re welcome. Our ashen faces are now your face too. Beautiful meat. To want the person reflected in the glass is illogical. The rooms at the back were all curved. Nothing is going to come. May Pimlico’s grey rains fan you, as you leave our altar, like crepitating fronds of desiccated palm. But we will never leave you: welcome us, your new sisters, like a balm for your peripheral vision. May the krill-rich sky over Angel Tube blacken under our shibboleths of weightless flesh. You’re welcome. Go. Work on the hazard that has been left to you: the mouth, its colour and the screaming. All the crows in the bare black branches scream too, for now they are a law, Lazarus, as are you.