Randy Brown Jr. Speaks of Writer's Block in Utopia

Fighting Writer’s Block in Google Chat

There’s never enough time.

Time: my ultimate enemy.

Enemy: a friend.

A friend told the red coats where I was hiding.

The red coats made me confess.

And so, here I am,

rotting in a cell made of three hands and numbers I know all too well.

Time is my enemy.

Who said anything about hell?

Fighting Writer’s Block on Sunday Night

She basked in a bevy of mist.

She was the first of her kind;

from Greece with hugs,

and those who accompanied her—

miles from the tail-end of a current gone south.

She was the best of mine,

even when she was out of her mind.

Ninety-Seconds for Life

Mural of the unscathed mind,

read me a line from my demise.

And if you could be so kind as to

write with red ink from the souls of

beings who have been reprimanded

for romanticism, skin color, or faith.

My faith has brought me here today,

in a way in which can only be written for

grand screens.

Utopian scenes haunt me in my sleep.

For the sake of humanity, in another life,

I write stories.

For the sake of a family,

I share experiences that would, otherwise,

be characterized as ‘not-real’ if not for

three letters: MFA

Fuck you.

For the sake of those who do not believe,

I walk the blocks of a concrete jungle,

heavy optimism in tote:

Someone else did it here;

written before the eyes of God.

True North

for Julia

It was our dream to be here,

yet I feel as though

I was the one who was extremely serious.

One must be nearly extreme,

desperate,

or borderline insane to

make life altering decisions for dreams.

Or maybe The Sparrow lied,

hiding behind beliefs that

I’d wait,

go away,

or further move mountains to remain within distances of the asylum.

If we’re all crazy,

but The Sparrow viewed me as the Only

then our cells float side by side in hurricanic tides,

and it is her misunderstanding of perspective

which voids her of truth.

It was our dream to be here.

The Sparrow now nests in a land far from thee.

It was our dream to dream here.

I wonder if she still dreams.

Randy Brown Jr. is a writer, visionary, and creator. He attends The New School's MFA in Creative Writing-Fiction program in New York City. His writing has been published in The Sting, the Student Lifestyle Magazine of Kennesaw State University. He served as a juror for the 2015 NYC Scholastic Writing Competition. He is currently working on his debut novel--a work of literary science fiction."