Hubris! Babbling in Babylon! Lies, rumors, cockroaches as a consolation, stealing in through your own window because the landlord has barred the door. Scripts that yellow in producers’ files until they are rewritten for a television series. Hubris, you say hubris? It is one thing not to get paid, not to have a grant, to lose one’s own hard-earned office-worker paycheck to finance “The Sonnets of Shakespeare” rather than adorning one’s body and home and line one’s stomach and pocket -- and it is quite another to survive at the mercy of quaint curiosity. Oh, we wanted to revitalize the blood of the theater and instead have to clean rat-infested apartments to save other artists’ lives and God’s muse. I’ve built stages upon which I’ve been denied the use. I don’t understand how it happens -- one actor slashes himself onstage, another urinates on the radiators offstage, yet another defecates himself and the audience screams and tears the lighting off the grid, usually-Christian-Episcopal parishioners throw bricks and scream obscenities, underground”liberal” actors screech ethnic slurs, friends are lied to, actors quit on opening night, the stage catches fire, off-Off Broadway is a floor show in hell!

“Hubris”! -- you speak to me of “hubris”. Well, I am so tired of label-makers who can’t spell, slanderers who make up stories when the truth is more vivid and exciting, foundations that are on top, publishers who are actually privashers, publishing private trash, theaters in lofts, basements,, garages, churches, brownstones, storefronts, halls, gymnasiums, and their HUBRIS! Critics with their hubris, producers with their hubris, actors with their hubris, it amazes me that I’ve any hubris myself. Pearls before swine! This is it -- there’s no bottom left to hit. Sin City. Icebergs and blacklists! How deep they run!!!

from Donald L. Brooks' play 'SHOWCASE"

The morning light falls evenly
Cross the sky
The pending storm
Not yet secured its hues
Though brother calls with cheerful news
The rain lets not the stars peer through
As midnight falls and all is still
Natures tears have soaked the soil
By candle comes the folowing day
With hope for it to lead the way

It's the blood, the vultures smell it
We lick our wounds for nourishment
Our carcasses not yet still
Tremble in anticipation
The stones upon which we lie
No longer fly in torment
We turn away as not to view
Open wounds among us
Lustful laughter lifts our listless lives
Where tears could not arouse them
Darkness in the blazing light
And soon the circling ceases.

Summer persists step by step progressing to what we know will be our fall. Caesar and I -- we live for only now to awake to another day in wonder. Blood, aches, pains, memories, unfulfilled hopes and dreams, madness held at bay, growls from a corpse, snarls from the dead, laughter from the living and everything continues to expand -- there is no end and there is nothing in the end but the snap of rotting flesh, the ghastly ghost of memory whispering.

FOOTLIGHTS
A shadow duet for two actors from Donald L. Brooks' play "SHOWCASE"

Trap door
in my nightmare
The scenery went up
and I went down
Blood in a comic operetta
A one-man show in a hippodrome
Lurking, lurking at the stage door
The understudy forgot his lines
Naked
In a costume drama
Villain
Of a buffonery

Footlights! Footlights! Footlights for theatricals!

There is a stark only face I control
I don't look to stage left, I don't look to stage right
Ahead, behind, above, below
There's no where to go
There's no where to go.

There is a dark, lonely place in the soul
You can look to stage left, you can look to stage right
Ahead, behind, above, below
There's no where to go
There's no where to go.

Footlights, footlights, footlights for theatricals!

Why
is the audience in the other room?
Why
are there no lines?
Othello
becomes
Macbeth
Why has this divertissement
turned into a burlesque
Mise en scene for murder
and everything is real.

Footlights, footlights, footlights for theatricals!

"Never make someone a priority when you are only an option for them."

Babylon
O alas, thy children are whores
Though there be the rare exception
Lust exudes from dewy pores
So it was from their conception
Fie say I, you say to me
All in hell and yet too free
If so they’d drool and spit and swill
But none I know does this at will
Ah, sweat and blood and tears all three
I saw them on their knees in plea
Cry naked save for filigree
Buy me buy me buy me buy me
Nay, “ay me!” the quote, thy quoth wrong
And give not doubt where doubt is due
When thus your eyes and ears err long
Methink you wished they knelt ‘fore you!

I live in a magic carnival with what goes on while asleep -- dreams, nightmares -- life deals us such a hand sometimes there is no difference between them -- do I talk, do I scream, I have woken in laughter -- age blurs what may have once been a dream into what was not -- but is there a distinct time for consciousness -- times are we might wish that something was a dream, or that a dream was not, but real and there was a time when I was not sure if it were not real, but in recalling it seems to be neither. I often wonder what life is like at the end of the life of someone who’s not me -- what could that be -- by one passing I was told “what a waste”, I asked “what”, “life, my whole life was a waste”, “but you did things”, I said, “what a waste, what a waste” the passer repeated. Standard to judge? By whose? Had I been incarcerated for life would I manage to imagine I was free -- free of the world, the cruel, the mad and the meddling -- but having paid a visit, it is there too, the cruel, the mad, the meddling and strict, strictly speaking. Names attach themselves to never detach -- the freedom is ours to commit social suicide and continue to exist in another form. Incarceration condemns you to who you are or were, with no exit. And the the creatures in the carnival scream, "the lights, the lights, remember the lights!"

I tried to beat some sense into that boy, I beat him hard, there just was no other way. When you got eight of them to care for and still more to come -- well, he was always trouble.

Always got his brother in trouble, his brother was a good boy, never did anything wrong. His father didn’t like him much, so I took care he wouldn’t be rough on him -- he was a good boy.

Donald had to be punished -- more and more as time went on -- he’d pretend, he’d lie, he’d just not say anything. He’d hide, he’d hide things, he broke things, he didn’t obey, he caused trouble.

I beat him every time I could find a reason -- I wanted him to know that he’d be punished in life if he did anything that his brother wouldn’t. His brother was a good boy.

Then he started running away -- and when he was caught, he told them that I pulled his pants down and beat his behind with a board. Well, yes, that was the only way -- when he turned sixteen he decided he was too big, so he refused to take his pants down -- I woke up his dad and had him beat good -- more than I wanted really, the boy was limping with an awful cough and bloody face -- had him sit down with the other kids just so they could see him cry, but he wouldn’t cry anymore!