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:
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Latest Updates
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I have finalized the role for The Friend and am currently working with an actor to finalize the role of Pain.
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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
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.
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
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
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)
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
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,
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