Love Poems at the End of Our Lives (Poetry Book Trilogy)

Project Overview

This project is going to be a series of three character driven poetry books that portray various stages of the same story.  The books are done.  All but one of the books is in print.  The entirety of the books can be listened to (read by me) on my YouTube channel.  (I am also going to write another sequel called The Revenant, which I have not started writing yet.)

The three books were or will be published by Melodium House, except for the first one.

These books are Love Poems at the End of Our Lives,  The Last Poem, and The Penultimate Poems.

They follow primarily six characters.  First The Poet (male), who is often viewed as a different version of the author. (6899 words)

The second character is Serenity (female), a young woman, atheist and punk rock poet, brimming with passion while she was alive, who was murdered on the last day of high school. ( 17913 words)

The third character is Pain, (male)  a character that Serenity was in love with and takes her loss harder than any other person in their school.  (12754 words)

The fourth character is The Friend, (male) who was a friend of both Serenity and Pain and tells Pain things about Serenity he never knew while Serenity was alive. (901 words)

The fifth character is The Storyteller (male) whose voice is only heard in one poem (519 words).

The last is The Witness (male) who has a brief poem at the end of Love Poems at the End of Our Lives (18 words).  The Witness's audition will be his only line.

I am looking for people who can bring the characters to life.  This is a paid gig and I will need you to sign a basic contract before signing on to your part and receiving your first payment

I will also need a narrator who will briefly introduce the title of each book and read the end credits.  

Please record in mono for the final project and use a high quality microphone with no background noise.  

In your audition state the brand and type of microphone you will be using.

Word counts are close approximations,  I acquired by copying and pasting all the required lines into word documents, one for each character.  

Link to my previous project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0jtVvKg1Rs

You are viewing the logged out version of this page.

When you are logged in, you can comment, add submissions, create projects, upvote, search open roles, and way more. Login here.

Latest Updates

  • Role for the Friend has been Finalized. Pain Cast

    I have finalized the role for The Friend and am currently working with an actor to finalize the role of Pain.
  • Serenity Role Has Been Completed

    Thank you everyone for your patience. As I said before I am completing one role at a time. I have just received the final lines for the character of Serenity today which is the first character I have worked on. I will begin casting the next character very soon. Thanks again everyone.
  • Role For Serenity Cast

    I have cast someone for the role of Serenity. I am currently working with her to get the lines recorded. I think I will work on one role at a time from now on, so I've taken a short break from listening to auditions, as I zero in on completing this part. Thanks so much everyone!
  • Stoked For This Project

    Thank you to everyone who has auditioned so far! I am stoked for this project and cannot wait to start recording. However, I just want to let everyone know that it may be a week or a few weeks until I start reaching out to people and move forward to getting the contracts signed, the scripts sent and the first payments sent. I'm thrilled by the responses so far to this casting call. Thanks again! - Joseph Leo Hickey melodiumhouse.com
Voice Actor
Voice Actor
The Poet
closed
Unpaid
Role assigned to: WReTCHeDNSTuFF

First The Poet (male), who is often viewed as a different version of the author. (6899 words)

  • i have a dear friend close to my heart named Christina Grimmie

    she realized how much you had hurt me

    and offered to write a song with the poem 

    about how much you broke my heart knowing that you would hear it 

    and feel what i feel

    the song charted number one in north america for eighteen weeks 

    you heard it and fell in love with me again

    but actually it was only just a dream 

    Christina is dead i have no friends 

    and a poem wouldn't change your mind anyway


  • whenever i read your words

     i hear you speaking in your own voice

     and i am in the woods reading the pdf you sent me last night 

    something about unity and how every voice fades into the other 

    how our emotions unite us there's something you've been trying to tell me

     you have given up on religion forgotten about god "lost faith in any book" 

    there's not even a vague hope for finding a heaven now 

    there's just nothing it's better to be burned alive 

    than to be the one doing the burning and the things 

    that gave you peace are detestable to you now


    you think about the person you were before 

    and you realize that every tree that grows toward the sky 

    was meant to reach for it 

    like we are meant to reach out for love 

    and you think about Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver 

    and a few others 

    and you read their works 

    and no one will read your words or hear them 

    no one will pay attention for one moment 

    more things have failed us than our faith 

    i admire the fact that you told your "spiritual father" before cutting him out of your lief 

    that he had become the dark lord and you had become like "Kylo Ren" 

    except you said, for you there would be no face reveal 

    because you knew that you had become ugly both inside and out 

  • with this appreciation, you wonder what your last will and testament will be, “at the end of your lief,” and in this testament you realize that “it is love that keeps our cells together,” that this lief needs to be lived as if there is “no resurrection, no reincarnation.”  and as your lief continues you realize that poetry is the music that unites all of us and that the words repeated back to you “all rhyme with the lonely part of your heart.” 

    these words we hear are the love poems at the end of our lives.


Voice Actor
Voice Actor
Serenity
closed
Unpaid
Role assigned to: amandaysabelle

Serenity (female), a young woman, atheist and punk rock poet, brimming with passion while she was alive, who was murdered on the last day of high school. ( 17913 words)

  • i want to hide and even disappear 

    but not in the poetic way

    i mean actually hide and even disappear

    i don't think in a poetic way

    would you rather be normal or weird? i'd rather be with you

    when we lose control of ourselves and forget how to love 

    it's going to be broken, a nightmare, twisted,

    there is something inside of me, 

    that is ready to be unleashed on the world

    pure disbelief that this is the lief we've been given

    my name is Serenity, 

    the girl you will find silently walking through these hallways, the same expression on my face,

    pure disbelief that this is the lief we've been given

    we're just kids, why are our lives already broken? 

    i want to sleep without fear of violence, the way it was when everything was handed to me

    i write poems in every classroom and every hallway

    do you believe in lief after death? i believe that death 

    is what there always is and ever shall be world without end


  • today is the first day of eternity 

    it is longer than you think, 

    it goes on forever and ever 

    and there is nothing after or before

  • in less than an hour i filled the pages of that notebook 

    sometimes i feel lonely but it doesn’t bother me 

     

    sometimes when i’m at work at retail stores

     i stare at the ceiling  and think and imagine my life in other countries

      but now i am lying alone in my room 

    thinking about the world we created together  

    when we were kids thinking about how much  

    we have grown in the past year thinking about  

    the revival that will encompass our own lives as the next year cascades into us 

     

    i had an entire binder of movies  

    and a shelf full of books  the same stories 

    i would read over again contemplating the nature of re-created things 

    and if there will be a re-creation in my own life or yours 

    because there is so much doubt and so many things we don’t know about eternity

     the one thing i want to do is leave this town and go  

    to a big city and see the skyscrapers and then contemplate

     the same questions  and see if my answers have changed 

    but if my answers are not true 

    if not even with all wisdom in the world can we find the nature of created things  

    and the nature of passing things 

    then how can we hope to know anything  about these things?

     and if we don’t know anything about these things we are skydiving

     out of a plane into an ocean of regret

Voice Actor
Voice Actor
Pain
closed
Unpaid
Role assigned to: chagendorn

Pain, (male) a character that Serenity was in love with and takes her loss harder than any other person in their school. (12754 words)

  • and we touched hands and saw different galaxies 

    spinning out of place, 

    we saw volcanoes exploding destroying entire cities,

     we saw the hopes of worlds ending and the birth of worlds beginning 

    we saw the days pass where i sat alone dreaming about Serenity 

    and she said that there would be no more despair


  • after we had seen life through the eyes of every human person, 

    Serenity took me by the hand and whisked me far away once more

     we saw the wars we had experienced before and felt what God felt when he witnessed them, 

    we had never felt compassion until we felt the unbearable pain

     you can love someone so much, you can be so close to someone 

    you can have them deep in your arms and feel them bury themselves

     into your chest and then they can be gone and you will never feel them again 

    and then there will be tears and those tears will never be seen or heard by anyone,  

    but they will be witnessed by God, they will be always invisible to every other person 

    and then Serenity reminded me of all of the love i had experienced

     of all the joy there is to feel in every human person how the truth of this joy

     flooded every ocean and empty space in the world just before the end 

    when people realized “why are we fighting? don’t we all end up in the same place?” 

    and then she showed me music and beautiful melodies,  

    that portray this same joy, no one could escape from it at the end of the world


  • i have missed Serenity

    nothing is inevitable except life in all its fullness

     the orchestra and the choir 

    the most epic story that no one will write but we will witness 

    it together i will wait here for you and we will tell it to each other 

    when we feel each other


Voice Actor
Voice Actor
The Narrator
closed
Unpaid
cast offsite

The narrator will briefly read the introduction to each book and the end credits.  I will cast this last, after all other roles are finalized so I can have the names of the actors read for each character at the end of each book.

  • The Penultimate Poems

    By Joseph Leo Hickey


    Published by Melodium House


    Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. 

    The following group of poems were sent to the email inbox of every student at a high school years ago by a student named Serenity after her first day there.  This group of poems was only widely read after her death.  And only after she was murdered, did these poems gain recognition.  People assigned new meaning to each of them.

  • Joseph Leo Hickey lives in Virginia.  He is the author of six other poetry books,  including Baptism of Apathy, Unity,  Love Poems at the End of Our Lives, Liefie,  The Last Poem and Purity:  Redeemed.  He is a double graduate of George Mason University and is currently twenty-seven years old. He is the founder of Melodium House.

  • Music by Joseph Leo Hickey and Sebastian Bach.

    Visual art by Michael Thompson

    Matt Damon as The Poet.

    Tom Hanks as Pain.

    Christian Bale as The Friend

    Emma Watson as Serenity

    Leonardo DiCaprio as the Storyteller

    And Brad Pitt as the Witness


    Narrated by (Your Name)


Voice Actor
Voice Actor
The Friend
closed
Unpaid
Role assigned to: Mirthy

The Friend, (male) who was a friend of both Serenity and Pain and tells Pain things about Serenity he never knew while Serenity was alive. (901 words)

  • before her first kiss, she realized the things we are lacking are what grow to define us


    what we want is what we mold ourselves after 

    which is why you take after her so much you've gained so many of her interests

     that she used to have you grieve and think that she's missing from your life

     so you have to fill that in with something and you inhale it into yourself 

    and it becomes part of you punk rock bands you never listened to before 

    now are your favorite thing you see her face in your dreams 

    and you know "why couldn't we say these things 

    to each other while we were alive? why is it always when it's too late?" 

    and as promised here is the love poem she wrote about you

    it's nothing special

    just words scribbled out on a page

    scanned into a computer i'll send you the file tomorrow


  • Serenity stands by the train tracks

    wondering about her future and the first thing that comes to her mind 

    is the fact that she read an article in a psychology magazine 

    that said people often have a random thought that comes into their head

     when they stand near a train and that thought tells them to jump onto the tracks

     and for a few seconds of misery she would then feel nothing afterwards, 

    nothing at all because that thought came into her mind too 

    and she didn't know where it came from or why she could not control her subconscious 

    but this book is not about suicidal thoughts or death 

    it's about love poems 

    let's hear some poems written by her

    the first thing she said was that thoughts 

    and ideas are hard to express

     because there are only so many ways you can express 

    the same idea in a different way because all she thinks about is the same thing every day


Voice Actor
Voice Actor
The Storyteller
closed
Unpaid
Role assigned to: LHeidbrider

The Storyteller (male) whose voice is only heard in one poem (519 words).

  • dreams  we have both forgotten 

    when i am working as a waiter living a stressful life

    when i want to be far from here somewhere alone with you,

    there are so many places we can travel to     

    delete the past memories make new ones with me

    the old excitement, the dreams you had before mean nothing 

    they signify nothing with them you will feel nothing 

    stay with me for awhile and i'll show you 

    the world that you’ve been daydreaming of, 

    beware of the dreamers 

    because they will inherit the future beware of the hope inside your soul,

     it will burn the world up

    inspiration is all around you

    each day that passes with you is one and the same with forever,


Voice Actor
Voice Actor
The Witness
closed
Unpaid
Role assigned to: Kegan Prichard

 The Witness (male) who has a brief poem at the end of Love Poems at the End of Our Lives (18 words). The Witness's audition will be his only line.

  • you're wrong about eternity, Serenity






  • with you i feel 

    no longer alone,

    fallen into the depths of peace

Comments

Public Submissions

You are viewing the logged out version of this page.

When you are logged in, you can comment, add submissions, create projects, upvote, search open roles, and way more. Login here.