Background: Beginning sometime in 2012 during my sophomore year of college, I started to contribute poetry, illustrations, and short narratives to the open-source production company run by Joseph Gordon-Levitt entitled HitRecord. The site’s intention was to encourage collaboration between creators from all facets and variabilities of artistic fields. One continual effort called “tiny stories” encouraged writers to devise compelling and moving poems while implementing as few words as possible— an endeavor to find complexity in simplicity. Knowing my verbosity, I found this challenge to be particularly interesting and a test of my capabilities. The results are presented below. The final poem, “Marionette”, inspired an illustrator who produced an animated image, which was then promoted by Joe and subsequently used as the visual representation emblematic of HitRecord’s Sundance 2012 show titled “Independence”.
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Blank Canvas
The girl was a blank canvas
allowing others to color her world
until one day when she erased the graffiti
and painted on a new face to be unfurled
Still Waiting
I sat waiting for you at the intersection of maturity and responsibility
But you never arrived
Creativity
Reality limits possibilities
Art creates them
The Sand King
Grain by grain his empire dissolved...
Strangers
In the future, we will be friends,
we will be happy, and
we will be lovers without regret,
but for now, we are just two strangers; two people who haven't met
The Edge
I stand at the edge of reality and the sea of dreams,
A place where nothing is as it seems
Tired of the world in which I reside,
I step off the cliff and tumble into the tide
The Marionette
I was a marionette dangling from a string,
forced to act, to dance, to do just about anything.
One day I decided to end the abuse,
so I found some scissors and I cut myself loose