THE POETS
after Pierre Reverdy

1. A lamp in the corner of a bare room.
Strange, though – it doesn’t look like any lamp we’ve seen before.
Look harder, and you’ll find that there’s a man standing beneath the lamp shade,
a lightbulb shining in his mouth.

2. On the other side of the room, a musician dressed in evening wear sits in a plastic school chair.
He cradles an enormously large mandolin in his hands.

3. CLOSE UP: on the musician’s hands as he begins to play.
The strings on the mandolin are very sharp.
The musician’s hands start to bleed.

4. A TITLE CARD:

HOW ARE WE TO FORGET OUR POVERTY?

5. The man-lamp listens to the musician for a few moments, then steps forward and slowly leaves
the room.

6. A staircase, illuminated by a single lightbulb on the landing.
Footsteps approaching from the upstairs hallway.
The man-lamp appears.
He walks down the stairs at the same slow, funeral pace as before, until he disappears out of frame.

7. Back in the room, the musician lies on the floor, dead.
On the walls behind, he has written in his blood:

THEY FALL ONE BY ONE
BUT DO NOT KILL THEMSELVES

8. Outside. A residential block, somewhere in contemporary Brooklyn. Night.
The man-lamp walks down the center of the street, his lighthead glowing like a lonely
candle.