04 - Greek Mythology

The sky was once filled with gods.

They came from us.

From our need to worship something larger than ourselves.

We created the gods.  Born of our fear and hope, they launched into the sky, escaping our hearts and finding their homes in the clouds-

and then higher, deeper into the sky amongst a forest of stars,

We gave them a history and they came into being and they whispered secrets into our ears, secrets that were really lies about how

They made Us

and We believed them.

We believed their lies, disguised as secrets and we held their stories close to our hearts before we began telling them to one another and the world.

But the gods, they stopped watching.  They stopped protecting us.

So we destroyed them.

They fell from the sky, through the stars and then the clouds, littering the ground with their broken bodies.  But we did not recognize them.

By then they were just stories

and no longer existed.

03 - Breathe Again (Sara Bareilles)

You.

Sometimes, words lie.  They are unreLIEable, anyway.  Because how could a word that holds so much weight be so small and contained?

Like, for example, You.

                                                     Y
                                                     O
                                                     U
                                        Even in all capital letters,
                                           it's not large enough

Little letters, each holding one another's hands, packed together into

You.

when You are really the ocean & every grain of sand

I.

That's a different story.  I is different from You, you know, because it stands straight and tall and isn't as full as You.  I doesn't need to be as full as you because I is not as full as You.  

I can also turn into Me which gives me variety, but as for you, there is only You.

I can become the number 1 in Times New Roman Numerals, but yOu can only be YoU, 

                                                                                                                   ( even when you write it like that )

                                                                                             and that just isn't fair.

It isn't because You are

YOU

should be

are

as big as the world itself

to

me

.

Sometimes, people fall asleep and they never wake up again because their hearts stop beating and they stop breathing.  Their eyelids close and their pupils get smaller and the irises stay their color and stare straight ahead at the back of the blackness of the eyelid and they breathe in one last time and their hearts start stopping, they 

beat

       bea

            be

               b

                 ..

                  ..

                    ..

                      .

                        .

                          .

                            .

                             that's when we need a bigger word for You 

                             because the hole left by you is larger than the universe itself.

                                        That hole sucks all the air out of my world like a vacuum and I can't breathe

                               and if That hole of You could take all that air away,

we are obviously in need of a bigger word.

(THEME #3: Song Shuffle. Put your ipod/itunes/music thing on shuffle. For the first song that comes up, Draw/write/whatever something that is inspired by the lyrics or simply what feeling the song gives you. Please put the title of the song in the description of your work. )

02 - Spirit Animal

Elephants.

Why?

Because.
They are -
                  (how do I say)

They are
              majestic

They are
              beautiful

They are
              .............magic.
                                ^  There's the word I was looking for, Magic.

They are a source of magic, sparking imaginations for generations - you can see it if you look through the lines of time.  Ancient magic, passed through the blood stream of each, perhaps because to look upon their mere existence is magic in itself.

How do creatures so large even exist?
And how can they be so gentle?

Elephants come to the tip of my mind while I'm in the trance of sleep and whisper secrets into my mind.
They journey so far to come to my brain and fill my heart with Hope.
                                                                                                 ^ That's the other word.  That is, Hope.

A beacon of hope and proof that magic is as ancient as the earth herself and a hope we can one day understand it. 

01 - Self Portrait

I write words.

I worship the spaces in between each word so we can read each one fluidly andarenotreadingthemlikethis
                                                       though that is beautiful, too.

                                    ^^^ Sometimes I do that

Because words don’t like being contained by lines, sometimes words are meant to

F                      l                                   y
            F                      L                                  Y    f    L          y          Up &  

                        F                      LO       AT       &                                             d o w n  & -

They often wind up in the mouths of characters I create.

I like to write by hand in print with a fine tipped pen because my handwriting is really tiny when I write by hand so I need a fine tip to keep them in check but when I type I like to type in Georgia, because Georgia’s really nice, I think, but when I type my plays I type in Times New Roman in size 12 because that’s just polite and standard format and I only type in Courier when I want to be a Robot. Because Courier is for Robots.

[GINA sits at her desk at work, not doing her work but instead typing up her version of self portrait.  The keys make a delicious tapping sound and her large, dangling earrings occasionally jingle and jangle like twinkle bells]

GINA

They sit like this on the page,

“But come out of the mouths of actors like this”

(I don't always workshop punctuation)

My soul is composed of words.
If you split me open, you will see,
You will see,
All the words
            f
a
    l
      l
            o
               u

                           T

(Microsoft Words hates me)

I am more than words, of course, but what I am are all described by words and those words look like letters and those letters have spaces and there are space between spaces I like to fall into and –

I am Words. And this is how I look.