SADNESS-CAUSING PIECE

Morality Play

	

"Kiss me, sir."

"I will not. You are very wicked, and come from a terrible nightmare of sticky brutalities whose only advantage, I believe, was that they led to your brother's renunciation of malevolence, your family's only heritage."

"Oh, sir. What has all that to do with you and me?"

"You are wicked and I will not do the wicked in any way, on earth or in heaven, or live with the wicked or swing the wicked even angrily or even connive for the wicked's bereavement, or love the wicked or detach myself from my affairs for the wicked's sake or pledge my troth to the wicked even for the second it takes to light a torch under said wicked's effulgence, or groan with the wicked in height of mastery or earn the wicked's approval or approve of the wicked's wickedness or live under or over the wicked or consolidate my firms with those of the wicked or congeal under the wicked's eaves as ice or fuck the wicked as you, wicked, would have me fuck you."

"That is not true, sir. I would have you earn my respect by being my love and good conscience and seeing the effects of that love and good conscience on my often wicked behaviors. Lessening them."

"I would not want to engage in much truck with the likes of your wickedness. It would not do me to squander my soulful ambivalence on wickedness grave as yours, gaudy as yours, extreme as yours, plenty wicked as yours. My soulful ambivalence is not wicked and it is what has undone the past of the nasty things in the species and improved the good things and earned for the species a sort of okay place in the present that I think will last for at least as long as my soulful ambivalence finds its companions not in the ilk of you."

"Sir, I have lips that are great for kissing and are not wicked."

"Not wicked? How? When the whole of the beast is wicked, are not the lips wicked too?"

"Not wicked, sir. Nor I, essentially."

"Wicked and family wicked and wicked with pets and wicked up high and wicked down low like a bat and wicked consuming things and wicked ascetically and wicked damagingly to the commonweal and wicked benignly on occasion and wicked very much."

"That may be, sir. Kiss me, sir."

"It would be hard stool in breadloaves were I to kiss you."

They part.