The New Reformists

“The New Reformists” by M. R. Brown

The New Reformists

wear their

blue jeans

While shouting

works of

Walter Raleigh

A Highball Glass

“A Highball Glass” by M. R. Brown

He once sat at his desk and admired its scenery. Five items perfectly aligned, resting atop his desk. There was the typewriter he wrote on.  A Smith-Corona Electra 120, sea-foam green. There were the four cans of spray paint, the fourth a different brand. Blue, black, white, and red. There was the sign at the desk’s edge that questioned, “Have you read 1984 lately?” There was the framed photo. The first night he and his girlfriend spent together, framed in black. Lastly, there was the highball glass. Looking into its shape, he hated what he saw. He threw the glass against the wall, shattering it all over his desk. He picked up the piece closest to him, raised it to his throat and said, “You don’t have the fucking guts.” He lowered the glass and continued trying to write.

Excerpt From ‘Untitled’

“Excerpt From ‘Untitled'” by M. R. Brown

Max’s wife is an empty shell of a woman. She has lead two lives. One life was of immense joy and play. She would do most everything. She sang in the honkytonks and bars, she saw the Sierra and the Nile, she traded tales with British blokes, she tasted catch of Italian shores, she conversed in back alleys with Lennon, she read poetry with Ginsberg. Her days were blank sheets filled by ink. Now, a voice lost in the breeze, she lives only to say things she once knew. Her hands have lost their deftness. Her eyes no longer can see beauty. She speaks in past tense. She clings to what she once knew in hopes to assimilate it into her now daily life.

Excerpt From ‘Untitled’

Untitled

by M. R. Brown

“Your clock is ten minutes fast” said the man checking his watch. He is a smaller built man, clad in a white shirt and worn blue denim. He is slightly balding with a cigarette in his mouth and a pack in his breast pocket.

“Yeah?” replied the driver “are you sure that watch of yours isn’t ten minutes slow?” The driver is a man of fifty. His white hair hangs slightly above his shoulders and he coughs with a passion. He refuses to hide the grit in his teeth.

The two men are driving in a 1977 Dodge pickup. The truck has travelled many roads prior to this trip. Its paint is of a muted brown, complete with tarnished chrome mirrors and spots of rust. Bits of paint are peeled, revealing a previous coat of green.

“What are we carrying anyway, Al?” said the passenger, still assessing his watch. “Every time the wind blows the wrong way I get a face full of some foul smelling shit.”

“I’m not really sure” replied Al, looking in his rear-view mirror, “I’m given the truck once it has already been loaded. I don’t ask what I’m hauling and I pick up the check at my destination. No questions and no concerns.”

“What if we’re carrying two tons of explosives, man?”

“Well then I would be surprised that this truck could move with two tons of weight in it.”

“You know what I mean. How can you not care to know what is in the back of your truck?”

“Maybe I’m too lazy to look back there or maybe I’m too concerned with what is in front of me.”

“Is that why you keep looking in that mirror? Most people I know drive looking through the windshield, not the rear view mirror.”

“Did you come here to teach me to drive or to keep me company? I thought you said you couldn’t wait to get away from your wife and kids?”

“I can’t do it, Al. Every single day, the baby crying, the wife yelling, I need an out, you know? Where is my escape? Anything is better than being in that house of mine, the house I can’t even afford to keep.”

“Well, Max, welcome to the good life.”

The two pass the Nebraska border, waved in by the cowboy at sunset. In town, the air carries the light scent of May. Roads deviate from pavement to dirt. The few cars that do pass give a slight hesitation.

Thursday, Full of Mescaline

I shot my typewriter once with a Nine Millimeter. Bastard never knew what hit it. -HST

A Higher Society

“A Higher Society” by M. R. Brown

Do you know what had me gassed about American society? I mean a real mean laugh. A couple I once knew told me how the wife was in porn. Real beaver flop. The husband, not to be outdone, said he was the director of his wife’s films. I asked how awkward it must be to not only watch another man have sex with his wife but then distribute the footage for all sixteen year old boys to stain their pants to. He told me it was only business. The only thing the guys couldn’t do to his wife was kiss her. THAT, he said, was intimate.

I laughed like hell.

Excerpt from ‘Untitled’

“Excerpt from ‘Untitled'” by M.R. Brown

The two pass the Nebraska border, waved in by the cowboy at sunset. In town, the air carries the light scent of May. Roads deviate from pavement to dirt. The few cars that do pass give a slight hesitation.

“I feel like I was stationed somewhere around here during the war” said Max.

“Out here?”

“No, not actually out here, but it sure as shit looked like somewhere out here.”

“Looks like at least six other states and as many different countries around here. A man could loose his bearings with all these farmlands and woods.”

“Everywhere looks like it could be where I was stationed in the war.”

One car drives by hastily. It is being tailgated closely by a white Ford Mustang.

“Some boys come home different” said Al, “from the war, that is.”

“Some don’t come home at all” remarked Max, slowly drawing on his cigarette.

“You got your hands, your legs, and what seems to be a head still on you. Could it be worse?”

“That’s not to say I never got wounded, you know? I got clipped only two hours in on the first day on the front line. The rest of the war was a window and a bed.”

“Did you come away with some medal of sorts?”

“The purple heart.”

“That’s an honor.”

“That’s an accident” Max sharply replied.

“How so?”

“No one gets a medal for something they do on purpose. You only get a medal if you fuck up. I had no intention of getting shot. A lot may have been going on but I’m sure my goal was not to get shot. My medal is only a reminder of failure. That is why I can not wait to pass it on to my boy and have him believe it means something more.”

The Sunday morning crowd has congregated to Turm’s Market. Outside the Dodge’s windows are the wasteful cars in the parking lot. A faint concoction of weathered blues and champagne browns. Every passenger is seen sitting in their car, staring as the two drive slowly by.

O Captain! My Captain!

“O Captain! My Captain!” by Walk Whitman

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up–for you the flag is flung–for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths–for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Mad World

“Mad World”

by M. R. Brown

ACT 1

Scene 1: Two twenty-something year old men lay in the snow, side by side. Clad in black jackets and scarves with red hats. Both men place their hands beside themselves. They stare at the sky and witness the branches of the trees surrounding them tear across the screen. The world opens up and everything once stopped begins to move around them. Each boy is missing one thing. And there they lay. Still. Searching. Green lights are flashing in the distance.

Man 1: “All the world is a quiet place and no one seems to listen.

Man 2: If it’s any consolation, I don’t think I can either.

Man 1: We’ve grown attune to feeling safe in sounds around us.

Man 2: The “white noise” it’s called.

Man 1: Sounds are

Man 2:                    -without answer. It provides the same solace.

Man 1: Every night is passed in every household with a continuously reverberating hum.

Man 2: The world is endless without social interaction. The snow, the scene. How quiet a place this world must have been before man came. The only voice was that of the wind passing through branches and waves crashing on reefs. Humbled as we may act, this world is a place that was never meant for us. With the sky opened, do you see it there, where the lines are bent. (Points)

Man 1: Phenomena known only as fate has put me here. I never asked for what my eyes have seen. I never asked for where I have gone. I live as though film strips and photographs are flashing across my vision. Never do I touch, only do I sit and wait for the intermission.

Man 2: Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay.

Man 1: Whom do I owe for these eyes?

Man 2:                                                  -Whom do you answer for those eyes?

Man 1: There may be war, there may be suffering. These are images of sound to me. I see no war and I see no suffering. How do I change what I cannot even feel? To Whom do I owe the movement of my hand or the shattering of my voice?

Man 2: Rage against each second of silence. Too long have we lived in silence.

Man 1: Imagine a city bereft of sound.

Man 2: Where the city of Jericho still lies.

Man 1: People passing one another without regard to any social interaction. Life would be the woman who cries behind closed doors, unable to feed her child each night and pains to wake morning to face the day. She cries and no one listens, but I hear her. I hear her every day of my life and I turn away.

[One second passes between them. Man 1 can not stop it and Man 2 neglects to try]

Man 2: A tingle should spark your finger.

[The two men turn their heads left]

Man 1: I can find sounds in a flashing streetlight as though they were proclamations of an old bible. The cover is tattered, though.

Man 2: The light flashes red in intermittent sessions.

Man 1: I have found silence. I have found it between flakes of snow, in a frozen breath. I have found it in the bed covers of loved ones and the gazing eyes of enemies.

Man 2: The only sound unique enough to never be reproduced

Man 1:                                                                                      -is silence.

[One second passes between them. Man 2 stops it then releases it. A small, dark silhouette flies overhead. Fast]

Man 2: It’s a mad world, and we are the players of the piano.

Man 1: Is there anything left to be scared of?

Man2: There never was a place more filled with fear. I see violence, I see hate. I hear where anger rises from and I feel it too. I shake and I tremble at the thoughts founded on means of survival. I see it in a child’s eye. Dilated, as though lost in a dark room. Are youths not conditioned to fear? We are raised on beliefs that there is a lush green tropic out here. Look around you. White may be pure but is it not as empty as black? Our eyes are told to find sanctity in such vibrancy, but do you not feel as though you are forever falling? All that we eventually arrive to is a broken box of rotten fruit and smokestacks lit to blinding ash.

Man 1: But the flies, how they dance. (Slips away)

Man 2:                                               -And how we choke. (Slips away)

[The sky falls stark white with a yellow hue. Lights no longer are flashing. The end is nearing and the two men know this. Man 1 begins to cough up a violent red into the palm of his hand. The shape resembles a circle]

Man 1: My chest vibrates to the hum around us. Do you hear?

Man 2: (Listens but does not find) It may only be a twinge of the ear that sparks a note.

[Man 1 holds out the palm of his hand. An offering. Looks idly at it]

Man 1: When I was a child, my mother gave me a red ball. Simplicity, in form. I would roll that ball through every hall and drop it down every step. I would wait to see how it would respond, how the patterns would stun my eyes.

Man 2: Often times we learn most from the passing patterns before our eyes.

Man 1: I left my house to enter our woods.

Man 2:                                                       -There were birch trees.

Man 1: Buried beneath the cheated hearts of the leaves coating the floor lay a stone well. I dropped the red ball down the well to see what could happen. I pressed my ear and waited.

Man 2. (Optimistic, noting as though it might be true) The sky is passing grey.

Man 1. I waited and all I found was that life is an endless search for that cold spot in bed, that lover’s look into your eyes, and the disappointment of finding neither. I wished only to be able to bounce my little red ball once more.

[Man 1 closes his fist and lays it beside him. All has turned white]

Man 1: Never wake me.

Man2: I’ll wake you when we reach the end.

Man 1: When there is a skyline left burning and the wind to blow it our way?

Man 2: I’ll wake you when there is a last train, empty and burned black. I’ll wake you when the spirit leaves our bodies. I’ll wake you in lucid dreams, my friend.

Man 1: All the world

Man 2:                      -is a muck colored green”

[And as the snow fell he felt little more freedom than the buried blades of grass above him. He shone green in a world of white.]

The Radio Days

Scene 1: (A single light bulb is turned on revealing a staircase leading to a middle-class basement. The scene is dry, dingy. There are cobwebs that litter the once well maintained room. An old man of 87 years has pulled the light string and grabs the railing with a calloused hand and weary sigh. A staircase never used to trip the shaking in his hand. The sun spots from vacations with his family in Florida mark his now bald head. Down the stairs hang photographs of his wife and himself. One is their wedding, one is the first night with their baby son. The final picture is of the old man and his son greeting guests at a funeral reception. How long ago was it now that his wife passed? He still wears the ring. Years ago he tried to remove it but it would not come loose. He never tried again after that day.

The old man takes each step with trepidation. His life has been reduced to the slow pace and focus on each step. He advances towards the corner of the room where light no longer shone.

A blanket rests atop a vintage radio broadcast board. The microphone a cast silver relic of the 50’s. An individual desk lamp is turned on to reveal the priceless and obsolete part of history. Pulling the chair from under the board, the old man removes the framed picture of himself all those years ago behind the same board. His eyes are just as sharp, though the lines in his face have grown long and rarely does he smile anymore.

He sits in a heavy movement that pulls his shoulders down with him. Gently he runs the tips of his fingers across the levels he knows better than anything else in his life. Anything save for the face of wife. He sees her face in the mirror each morning when he dresses and beside him in bed before he falls asleep. He never can dream of her.

Gracefully he leans into the microphone)

– M. R.