LUXE -ardo 

Blueberry bar top,

Radiate sex,

Perplexed, and can't stop

Starin' at bitter, luxardo-soaked bourbon made with love,

Reflections of occupations shine

From moving picture painted windows,

Your sexy sleek ways

Move like music in sync with

My heartbeats think,

Drawing chalk lines,

Announcing tomorrows water diluted moonshine

Crafty cocktails never fail to please,

Even the drunkest of gazers can see in neon,

Mankind waited eons, for ions to make bygones,

And so on, and so on,

And one day I'll be gone,

But 'till then

I'll have to make due with my pen,

You peek over my shoulder like a living apparition,

Cause nothing as beautifully stunning

Could be a spirit,

But living, breathing flesh warm to the touch,

I forget where I've been tonight,

Cause all that matters at this moment

Is you, me, this, and my pen,

El fin.


--Jordan Ramay

Booyah

You get me,

Yet push me, pull me, hang onto me by a string,

The slightest pluck on me shows your efficacy and the mystery that you bring,

Rush in, wash, and console like the tides that swallow life whole,

Then remind me of the man that I once was and still am,

Girl...

Your whirl wind sweeps through like a rain-soaked hurricane that sustains

Until my mind can gather the essence that is you,

As much as I wish and attempt to dish up other entities which is me,

Your artistic, intrinsic drenched mind is all that matters to me,

Continue to let your spindle spin,

But let that prick on spindles prick count,

For it may amount to the everlasting love-joy-love we stay awake for,

Dream for,

Bleed for,

Die for,

But star-crossed lovers dream of better means to serve,

Thunder glimpses the horizon,

Like ten thousand soldiers trampling where our eyes have been tonight,

Locked lovers trance,

Executing lost lovers trance dance,

Sleep, don't sleep

Dream, don't dream,

Yet let young love flourish and nourish

Our cold heat starved kindred souls,

Bring your fire and bring your heat,

For some time near my heat will cease,

And I'll have nothing left but the life I thought was complete.

But at this moment, nothing is complete,

Unless I...have...you.

Booyah 


--Jordan Ramay

    

Chalk Lines

Suddenly awoken by the sound of shots,

Time stops...

Flickering luminecent red lights turn and pop,

Screeching eels peels through

Sadened nightgown crowded neighborhood streets,

Sobbing mother would have sold her soul

To have raised her son in any other place,

A better place,

A cleaner place,

A place not laced in crack cased dreams,

A place not awakened by undernourished infant screams,

Other mothers weep with merose encrusted hearts,

Elated that with their own sons they didn't have to part,

Young teen dreams and aspirations,

Mutaded into ghetto haunting apparitions,

Looking through tennis shoe lined

Electric lines at moonshine,

Brightening up the sorrow soaked chalk lines.


--Jordan Ramay

Chapter Two

            As Jeff stepped in, he immediately thought of stepping back out and just driving around the neighborhood for a bit. He often did this after a rough day at work. Which was pretty much every day come to think of it he realized.

            I would literally give my left testicle to quit my job, he thought. As the matter of fact,

might as well take both while your down there. Not like I've used either in the last ten years

except for the occasional release in the downstairs guest bathroom while pretending to take a

shit. I could never use "our" bathroom, which is really "her" bathroom of course. She'd know.

Somehow. She's demonically intuitive that way, he thought.

            Most of my shit to get ready is in the guest bathroom anyway, that way I don't disturbher beauty rest while I get ready at 5pm in the fucking morning to make sure I'm at myamazingly rewarding job by six. Kids, wife, mortgage, car...I'd keep the first and burn the ladderif I had the chance.
           "Honey, I'm home!" Jeff said almost puking in his mouth as he usually does when shit

comes out of it.

            "It's about fucking time. Jesus. What took you so long?" Jeff's wife Vicky asked. Were

you driving around the block again? Charleen Becket said she sees you just driving aimlessly

around our block with that creepy dead expression on your face that you get all the time."

            Charleen Becket. Ever since her husband left her, she's been keeping herself busy with the personal lives of everyone else in the neighborhood, Jeff thought. And to think that bitch waved at me all four times I drove past her house the other day. It's funny the people we pretend to be. Just waiting for the chance to judge and cause chaos in the lives of others to bring some kind of validity and make some kind of sense out of the fucked up cards we were dealt. Charleen Becket probably feels she was dealt a shitty hand, but the truth is she squandered the pocket aces she had when she verbally abused her husband Phil to the point where he was willing to loose everything he had worked for in a divorce just to get the fuck away from her. I saw Phil in downtown LA not to long ago during my lunch break. He was wearing ratty, wrinkled cloths and said he had barely enough money to survive and that he was living in a piece of shit studio in Little Tokyo and that he hadn't been this happy in years...God, I envied him.

            "You know I don't like it when you cuss around our children," Jeff replied.

            "Oh, I'm so sorry your holiness. It's not like they don't hear it at school for Christ's sake," Vicky argued.

            "I seem to recall Sarah's teacher calling me last week to talk about Sarah's recent use of the word you just used in front of her and where she might have heard such language. I told herit wasn't from me and it definitely couldn't have been from my saint of a wife," Jeff saidfacetiously.

            "You're such a fucking hypocrite! You were screaming obscenities at the top of your

lungs last sunday in front of David and the entire neighborhood as the matter of fact," Vicky said raising her voice.

            "I drove a nail through my thumb putting up his basketball hoop. I had to go to the

hospital," Jeff pointed out, trying to keep his cool.

            "Semantics!" Vicky screamed. "The point is, she could have heard those words anywhere and it's not fair of you to put the blame on me. You blame me for everything that is wrong in these kids lives and I'm fucking sick of it."

            You are literally to blame for every drop of psychological damage these kids have

endured during their very short existence on this planet, you complete fucking horror of a

woman, Jeff thought.

            "Okay. Fine. They could have heard it anywhere. Can we drop it, please?" Jeff said.

            "Whatever. We have an hour to get ready for the party next door. Please wear the new pinstripe shirt and silk tie I bought you at Nordy's last weekend. I don't want our outfits

clashing," Vicky mentioned as she walked out of the kitchen.

            Jeff had just remembered where Vicky was with the car when he put the nail through his thumb. They used to have two cars but had to sell Vicky's BMW once they couldn't afford the payments anymore due to Vicky being an out of work Real Estate agent after the market went to shit. He remembered David coming out of the house after he called his Mom to tell her what happened and him saying that Mom said to take a cab to the hospital because she just ordered lunch and couldn't get back with the car...What a woman, Jeff thought. What would I do without her. Probably throw a fucking parade.

            Jeff snapped out of it and realized he hadn't even had a chance to say hello to the only thing that mattered to him in life.

            "So guys, how was your day?" Jeff asked in a chipper, suburbinite father fasion. 

UNTITLED

       This is the first couple pages of a short story I am working on. Hopefully posting this will motivate the completion of it. Enjoy and I'd love to hear your feedback. 

  

     Jeff McMannis pulled into his driveway the same way he does everyday after putting in his eight hours at the office. He noticed several dark smudges coupled with indents covering his newly installed garage door that his son David had obviously been using as a backstop for his baseball.

    The remnants of a mid-afternoon tea party scattered across his lawn, compliments of his daughter Sarah…“Jesus Christ”, He thought to himself.

    As he stood and stared at the front door of his depreciating asset he thought of how he once had dreamed of being a famed musician. Traveling the planet doing the thing he loves most, meeting interesting people, and dining in five star restaurants. Maybe wrap up a show in Tokyo then jet down to Thailand for the weekend with his new flavor of the week that he met while checking in his bag at the airport. On the beach they’d talk and nap all day, then drink and fuck all night. He would fall for her, just a little, then realize it could never be. She would beg him to stay, but he would resist. As his jet leaves for Sydney from a private air strip in Tokyo he waves goodbye through the window at his flavor of last week, but all she can do is cry. He gets a feeling in the pit of his stomach like he is going to puke. Just then his flavor of this week approached from the left and asked if he would like anything to drink. The feeling in his stomach is gone and he is happy. This is the life he had always wanted…

            “Hey Jeff!  Jeff’s neighbor Steve yelled from his front lawn.

    Jeff had always hated that son of a bitch. He hated Steve’s perfectly trimmed lawn that he could afford to have tended to every other day, especially at 8 am on Saturday while Jeff was trying to rest after the work week. He hated Steve and his wife Kiki’s matching Mercedes-Benze’s that read HIS and HER’S on the license plates. He hated the fact that Steve never stopped smiling…ever. It was creepy at some points and led Jeff to imagine Steve as being not of this Earth. Then again maybe Jeff would never stop smiling if he had the millions that Steve had accumulated from his stupid fucking “Self Help” program he created called “Love Thy Self”. He convinced people to sit in front of a mirror for an hour a day and talk to themselves. It stated that the only way to true success was through focused forms of self vanity. People ate this shit up because who do Americans love most in the world?...Themselves of course. This guy was benefiting substantially on the stupidity and narcissism of our fair country. And he could not stop smiling. Jeff had always hated that son of a bitch.

            “Hey Steve!” Jeff smiled and waved as if they were childhood friends. Steve walks over to the fence dividing their property.

            “Kiki and I are heading up the neighborhood watch meeting tonight if you and Vicky want to stop by. Afterward we’re gonna crack open a few bottles of red I picked up last year on our trip to Africa. Should be just about ready to open. Had to slip the customs guy a few hundred to let us through with it, but it was definitely worth it. This shit will change your life.”

Jeff can’t stand when people make such absurd statements. He did his best not to cringe when the garbage spewed from the annoying neighbors mouth but still flinched a little.

            “You okay man?”

            “Yeah, just had some bad Thai for lunch.”

The prick began to size Jeff up.

            “You’re starting to put on a little weight, buddy. If you want, I can give you the number of my personal trainer and of course throw in a free copy of my seminar. You’ll be loving yourself in no time. So you comin’ tonight or what?”

    Jeff had a quick vision of bashing Steve’s head in with his stainless steal coffee mug that he was holding in his right hand. He would just let him lie there in his perfect stupid fucking rose bush finally making his existence useful as fertilizer. Just then he snapped back to reality.

            “I’m sorry… what are you having tonight? Oh, wait. The neighborhood watch thing. Yeah, we’ll try to stop by.

            “Losers try Jeff. Winners do. Know what I mean? We’ll see ya at eight. I’ll have that trainers number and the DVD set of my seminar ready for you.”

            “Okay, sounds good.”

            “I’ll see ya there Slugger and don’t forget that foxy wife of yours.”

    There was nothing more on planet Earth that Jeff despised more than being called condescending names like “slugger” or “tiger”. But this paled in comparison to Steve’s comment about his wife. Even though she was a vicious, lifeless excuse for a woman who could suck the Y chromosomes out of a man, he still couldn’t stand the way Steve flirted with her. It was the principal of the matter.

            “I’ll be sure to do that. Thanks for the invite and the DVD’s and everything. We’ll see ya there.”

            “Hey, love thy neighbor right?” Steve said with a stupid shit-eating grin.

    Jeff had never hated someone so much in his life.

            “Right.”

    Jeff turned and headed up the cobblestone path to his front door. He stepped up on his front porch and reached for the door handle but paused. He paused the same way he always does before he enters his house and contemplates what it would be like to never have to walk through that door again. He took his usual deep breaths and counted to five. One, two, three, four…five. He wrapped his hand around the knob and entered his depreciating asset.

To be continued.....

By: Jordan Ramay 

Character vs. Plot

By: Lawrence Konner

The best stories are character-driven as opposed to plot driven because it's the only way that you're going to get a believable situation. If you try to get characters to do what the plot determines, then they're moving falsely. Then it's just writer's intervention that's getting them to move. It seems to me that the ideal situation is to create a character and then put them in a situation.

An audience must first identify with the character rather than the story.

You will never get them to engage fully if they don't believe in this person and this person's dilemma.

Therefore, I think the first thing you should do before writing a script is to sit down and write a biography of that person. It should be as detailed as you want to make it: their background, their schooling, their social class, their interest and most importantly, their dreams.

Dreams are the most important because, almost always, what their dreams are will help you motivate the story. It's something they want.

Characters' weaknesses are essential too. You've got to know about their flaws. It helps feed the story because their flaw is what is going to be part of the obstacle that's going to prevent them from solving the story.

Characters in a good story have a set of outside obstacles to deal with and also a set of internal obstacles to deal with. To the extent to which those two things can be tied together, is to the extent which the story gets better and better.

The story's much less interesting if the protagonist doesn't have some kind of internal conflict or personal problem. Then it's all just "white hat" stuff. The best stories that we remember from myths on down, westerns, detective stories, any kind of genre movie, combine action plot with the internal conflicts. It's as if you can't catch the bad guys until you've beaten your own internal demons. Having more than one layer of conflict is more difficult and that's what separates the average action scripts from the good ones.

If you liked Saul Williams on Def Poetry Jam in the last post, I highly recommend you watch this movie. You can stream it on Net Flix.