Nicholas Roerich, "The Doomed City"

This poem was published in Hamilton Arts & Letters last year. I wrote it after a landlord in Stoney Creek shot and killed two of his tenants, to the absolute joy of some very sick people on social media. 

They said if we wait here we’ll go to another place where the 90s never stopped and the towers never fell, where Facebook never happened and streaming is something water does. They said if we wait here we can leave this place forever. We can run in muddy fields that aren’t there anymore and play ball in empty courts where McDonalds is now. Computers live in the family room and phones are bricks with long antennas. We can hide in our rooms. We can make things with paper and yarn. A tablet is a flat clay slab you learned about in school. We don’t know where our friends are. We can't text them. Can't Facetime. We have to go looking for them, knock on their doors, ring their landlines. Maybe we'll catch The Sopranos Sunday night. They said if we wait here we can start fresh, can live a new day in houses we can afford with jobs paying wages we can save. We can go to Blockbuster. When we’re feeling fun we can scrounge the dirty basements of sketchy video stores. We can be naïve. We can say something dumb and regret it later. We can do something kind and no one will ever see it. They said if we wait here we’ll be happy again.  We could be at the end of history. Democracy wins. All that's left is the stars. If we wait here. The sun is setting. Buses have come and gone. A single drop of rain beats the pavement. The trees are still. Birds silent. Billboards. Digital ads nonstop. Raindrop. We’re waiting here.

This is the pilot episode for Always Greener, a Hamiltonian born dramedy co-created with the immensely talented David Hall. The show is currently in development. If this were about 10 or 15 years ago, I'd imagine David and I would have hightailed it to LA to get this thing off the ground. Seeing as how literally everything in our world is changing beyond recognition, I'm not sure that LA is the place to create new shows anymore. But hey, what do I know. This is such a special passion project for both David and myself. I hope you'll fall in love with these characters as much as we have. We will continue working to bring this little gem to your screens. You saw it here first. 

A little taste of Volume 2! Isn't that artwork creepy? Listen now. 

You'll notice a few differences between the recording script and the recorded show itself. For one thing, in the script there are three episodes: Vineta, Houston, Skin, respectively. This works really nicely against the show's acronym name. However during recording, episode one was broken up into two. So there are four in total. 

If you’re curious to see what an audio drama script looks like, how it compares to the final recorded product, you’ll want to check this out. This script does not have my annotations, which I’m currently working on for future paid edition of the script. This edition is absolutely free to download. It includes a transcript of the RED ODYSSEY trailer, as well as two promos for Volume 1.5: VHS.