The one untidy thing

“My social life is such a mess,” you said,
   As if you were confessing to the murder
Of seven babies with an arrowhead.
   The truth is, dear, nothing could be absurder.
In our life’s bureau, there is always one
   Big drawer that’s a complete and total mess--
We pull it open and we’re overrun
   With matchbooks, coins, a Betsy Johnson dress, 
Ex-lovers, drunken nights, old cab receipts,
   Regrets, and bottles of stress medication--
A drawer which helps us say no to the Neats
   And save the wild from dull domestication.
     Clutter’s a beauty mark, dear--not a canker;
     Mess is not order’s failure, but its anchor.

Copyright 2011 Matthew J Wells

The Great War

Surrounded by the shrapnel of affection,
   I walk the mine field of our recent past--
If I take one step in the wrong direction,
   I’ll be kaput before I hear the blast.
I swing my head away from where the stench is,
   And turn my back on what we’ve both defiled;
The future’s somewhere out beyond the trenches,
   Where fields are green and poppies still grow wild.
Oh, I will wake up screaming in the night,
   My shell-shocked heart exploding in my chest,
To see your face flicker like candlelight
   Before it’s blown away, like all our best.
      And yes, I’ll live, but I will be the slave
      Of slaughtered love, dumped in a double grave.

Copyright 2011 Matthew J Wells

Opening Monologues: Wildest Dreams

Ah, the thinly-disguised autobiographical Trick Becket plays. Most of which I burned or shredded or batched up in a Strand bag to support that air conditioner in Inwood. Trick is still around, but he hasn't aged a bit. He's the narrator of the novel based on the Cedar diaries, which I may actually finish some day, and he's the main character in a play called No Soap Radio, which I may actually write some day. Here's an early appearance in a one-act called Wildest Dreams that actually got produced way back when, though not very well as I remember it, which is probably why I'm blanking on the date. Just so you know: yes, this woman is real, but she is not named Sheila. Who is also real, and whom I saw for the first time in years a few months ago. Monologue for another day; here's this one.

TRICK: When I think of Sheila I see myself standing across the street from her building. Leaning against a lamppost. There's a light on in her apartment. Shadows on the curtains.  Then the light goes out. And I try to picture the guy that she's with. The guy that she's with when the lights go out. And I think to myself, it could have been me. Turning out that light. The light by her bed. Where is her bed now? It changes. I've seen it against the right wall, against the left wall, lengthwise under the windows. It changes. Every time she dates someone, it changes. If you last a week, you wake up one morning to Sheila standing at the bathroom door, hands on hips, still wet from the shower, just staring. You're lying in the bed and she's standing there. Staring at the bed, the bureau, the bookcase with the twenty-nine pictures of her father. Just staring. A look on her face that says something's wrong, something's out of place. So she throws on a shirt, a guy’s shirt, not one of your shirts, somebody else’s, a shirt some guy left some night ages ago, a guy whose name she won’t even remember when you ask her, so don’t bother asking. She throws on a shirt and starts moving furniture around. And of course you help her, you get up out of bed and push things around, change things around, show her you’re helpful, dress the place up. Until it's done. Until she's happy. Until it's the picture of happiness. Until the next time, when somebody else is lying in the bed, and Sheila is standing there, dripping wet, staring. Moving things around in her mind. Knowing there’s something wrong here, but not knowing what it is. Knowing there’s something out of place. There’s always something out of place. And there always will be, no matter how many couches she moves. Because it's not the furniture that bothers her. It's never the furniture. It's that guy in the bed.

Copyright 1993 Matthew J Wells

Opening Monologues: Iphigenia at Trinity

I've been going through my files recently, and I've noticed that I tend to start plays with monologues.  And when I say "tend," I mean "almost without exception."  We'll leave the psychological explanation for that to future therapy sessions. 

THERAPIST:  Monologues mean that, even when you're writing about different people, Matthew, it's always "Me!" 
"Me!"  "Me!"
MATTHEW:  But plays are nothing but competing monologues, Doctor!
THERAPIST:  Which is why you describe yourself as a playwright, and not a writer. 
MATTHEW:  Son of a.

I'll post a bunch of examples over the next few days, so you can see how many different Me's I have in me.  The example below is from a play that my then-agent said had too much science in it and not enough people stuff.  When I handed her another play that was more character-based, she said it didn't have enough science in it.  I tell you--there's just no pleasing people who don't know what the fuck they're doing.  Which is actually one of the themes of Iphigenia at Trinity:

Scene 1

[1939. A classroom in the Institute for Physical Chemistry in Gottingen. JOHN HENRY WISE, 39, lectures the audience as if it his class of students.]


WISE:  What do killing a man in battle and teaching physics have in common? You might say nothing. And on the surface of things, you would be correct. But all equations are built upon solid facts, as a house is built on a foundation. Here are some facts. My father was Austrian. My mother is Jewish. Under the laws of Germany, this makes me Jewish as well. Therefore, under the laws which went into effect in 1933, I should by rights no longer be allowed to teach physics. But because of my distinguished service during the Great War, I was exempted from this distinction. So you see -– because I ran away to play soldier at an age not much older than your own -- and then killed several men, for which I was awarded a medal, and received a bullet wound, for which I was awarded an honorable discharge -- I was lucky enough to be permitted to remain on here in Gottingen as a professor of physics. My father died in the war, you know. So many millions, dead on both sides, and to me the only death that matters is my father’s. So. Another equation. What do physics and Greek have in common? You will say, aha, this is an easy one, because Herr Professor Weiss is not only our physics teacher, he is also a teacher of the classics. True enough. What do physics and ancient Greek have in common? Me. This is one answer. They also have something else in common. The Greeks constantly argued amongst themselves about the meaning of life. These days, physicists like myself, we find ourselves arguing about the meaning behind what we have discovered about life. Are they the same thing? I think they are. So we have yet another answer to our second equation. And since all things of any consequence travel in threes, let me propose one final equation for your consideration. I often ask myself, what ethical standards should a scientist apply to his work? As I see it, a scientist has three responsibilities. There’s that number again. The first is to employ the scientific method to answer questions, to create new things, and to raise humanity even higher above the animals. The second is to promote a greater understanding of the laws which govern the universe by explaining what science has discovered in terms and language which can be understood by anyone. And the third responsibility, the greatest of these, is to raise my voice and speak my mind as loud as possible when men with no scientific knowledge are deciding how to use those devices which science has created. So. The terms of my third equation are this. A scientist is a man with a voice. He has a responsibility to speak. It is part of the equation. He must speak out. In the long troubled history of the world, the story of science is the story of men who are compelled to speak out, even when the rest of the ignorant world demands that they must be silenced.




Copyright 2003 Matthew J Wells

love and death

You are the kiss that burns my two lips raw--
   The drink that licks my tongue with a new taste,
The sight that makes my eyes go wide with awe
   And my uncertain soul feel damned and graced--
The tapeworm I can’t feed enough, the hole
   Nothing can cover, nothing can fill in--
The champ who slap-shots hope into the goal
   Past my defenses for the final win.
You are the black ice that my skidding heart
   Is totaled by--the dish I gobble up
So greedily I choke--the serving cart
   That brings me champagne in a poisoned cup:
      The certain death of callous apathy
      That buries me in love’s vitality.

Copyright 2011 Matthew J Wells

Two choruses from The Anger of Achilles

1

There is a law above the law of man
  It has no name, but when we think of it
  And feel its power, what can we call it but
  Death

 Because we are aware of death
 Because we are aware
 
 Because, to throne the race of men above
 Creation's beastliness, Prometheus
 Graced mankind with the vanity of mind

 We mind the fleeting when
 Over the harmony of now,
 And fall like lightning to our graves
 Because all things that live are ruled by law

  There is a law above the law of man
  That calls us to rebel against our state
  It has no name, but when we think of it
  And feel its power, what can we call it but
  Life

 When Phaeton, son of Apollo, died
 Apollo threw submission to the dogs
 And yoked the tyrant Time to his chariot,
 Driving the flaming stallions of the sun
 Against their given course, to drag the day
 Back to the dawn before

 But he failed, for all his strength
 To do more than abuse the tortured earth
 And fashion failure from a godlike rage
 Because even the gods are ruled by law

  There is a law above the law of man
  That calls us to rebel against our state
  That orders respect even from immortals
  It has no name, but when we think of it
  And feel its power, what can we call it but
  Time

 Because we cannot rest until we die
 Because we cannot rest
 Life is the rage of always against never,
 Never to do more than abuse the earth

 And godlike Achilles, complete in revolt
 Drags the dead body of yesterday's triumph
 Down to the unforgiving grave of love

 His is the power of supremacy
 His equal's body fishes back and forth
 Behind his chariot, defiled
 Before the eyes of his father

 But not even Achilles can re-kill the dead
 Because all things that are
 Are ruled

  There is a law above the law of man
  That calls us to rebel against our state
  That orders respect even from immortals
  That unifies the breach of life and death
  It has no name, but when we think of it
  And feel its power, what can we call it but
  God


 
2
Here in the kingdom of time everlasting
 We sit before the life that lies ahead of us
 Like happy children in an empty theatre
 Thrilled at the anything-can-happen magic
 That shines the clearest when the stage is dark

 But when the play begins, when we have lived
 The only life we get, we look behind
 To see that what we once thought was our freedom
 Was just the prospect of the unportrayed

 God, let our days be what we do with them
 Not what they do to us

 Let us grow taller than the tree that bore us
 For the generation of men are like leaves
 Old ones dropped brittle to the withered grass
 Young shoots full of green promise in the spring
 Filling the branch and falling, flowering
 Even as other flowers fall and rise
 Upon the battlefield of life and death

 Where we are each besieged and sacked
 While in rebellious overthrow against
 The capital decree of flesh and blood

 Abandoned here by all but history
 And justice and the cause within ourselves
 We fight to see the day we fight no more

 The war for which the human race was made

Copyright ages and ages ago by Matthew J Wells

Songs for a Tuesday Morning: Sex Machines and the Broken-Hearted

Texas is burning, New York is drowning, half the people I know are floundering, and the other half are out there somewhere I guess--God knows--I don't.  So until God figures out that you  make it fucking rain where the fires are, let's all boogie down by answering two musical questions:


1.  What do you get when you cross this guy

with these guys?

Answer:  This guy:


Whole Lotta Sex Machine


2. And what happens when you remix Jimmy Ruffin so he sounds like a trailer for an indie movie?


Why this, of course:


Chasing The Broken-Hearted


Take it to the bridge, people, cuz unhappiness is just an illusion.

And boy do I deny it

Sometimes I wonder what you see in me.
   If I were you? God--I would never spend
Five minutes in my worthless company.
   How you can stand it I can’t comprehend.
The signs are bigger than the Zodiac:
   I piss away my gifts, I hold a grudge,
Blame the whole world for all the things I lack,
   Tell jokes and make remarks that always judge--
How you can see those faults and still see me
   Is totally incomprehensible.
Either you like to keep low company
   Or you get snowblind when it comes to bull--
     Or else you see the good in me that I,
     Because I fear to own it, must deny.

Copyright 2011 Matthew J Wells

Last in a series

Goodbye, my love.  I knew this day would come
   The day we said hello.  It was built in
Like painful death’s built in to martyrdom,
   Like guilt and punishment are part of sin.
This farewell was foretold by our hello.
   I felt it when my eyes locked onto yours
And saw not light but promised afterglow--
   Not open windows, but two unclosed doors.
Our first kiss mingled wine with whiskey’s heat, 
   A kiss that held two promises: the one
We couldn’t keep, and this one--bittersweet--
   Love’s final kiss, waiting like Chekhov’s gun.
       Close the book, sweetheart.  Close those sad eyes too.
       This sonnet is my final kiss to you.

Copyright 2011 Matthew J Wells

16 things that Shakespeare and I have in common

1. Everybody thinks we’re gay.

2. We own more books than clothes.

3. We never went to university.

4. That high forehead thing.

5.  Three brothers and a sister.

6. We’re total suckers for small and dark.

7. We do a lot of our writing in bars.

8. Our closest friends are theatre people.

9. Any evidence that we were brought up Catholic is purely circumstantial.

10. Blank verse is our natural medium.

11. We’re both haunted by Christopher Marlowe.

12.  The youngest brother was the first to die.

13. A ton of plays, but no royalties.

14. Sonnets.

15. If you lock us in a room with a naked woman and a pun, we’ll go for the pun.

16. When someone asks us, “How’s the wife and kids?” we say “What wife and kids?”