Apathy

This page is once again illustrated by Darren Parsons. Again, good work...but I expected more and he can deliver better.

Here are a couple more poems with fantasy creatures.

I deal with the themes in these poems a lot. What are they about? You decide!

The Unicorn

When I started writing poems seriously, I wrote quite a few that featured fantasy creatures. Go figure.

The picture is good...but I know it could have been better. Darren Parsons is really a very good artist. I hope to get some better pictures up by him sometime in the future...then you will know why I was disappointed with the finished product.

To me...this poem is about believing in magic. It is about believing in miracles. Sometimes I find that when we become adults, we forget all that stuff. We become bogged down by the mundane...and we forget what it was like to be a child and to believe in Santa Claus. I know Santa isn't real...I still believe in him. I don't want to lose that part of me.

What is this poem about to you?

Fairy Tap

First let me pose a question. Is it ok to put these up without retyping the poems? I'm thinking it should be since the pages can be made bigger with a couple of clicks.


This is one of the first poems I wrote in high school. Fairy Tap II is a variation of the other one. I thought it would be fun to rewrite one four years later and see what happend. As you can see, nothing.

This page is illustrated by Darren Parsons. It's an ok picture. I just wanted a bit more. As I said earlier, I don't tell the artists what to draw. I had them read the poems and draw what came into their heads. I've seen what Darren can do. I know he can do a lot better.

Enjoy cringing at the poems!

The Dragon

I like this picture. It looks like a man morphed into a dragon but kept human legs. It is the first full page picture in the book. I think it starts things off nicely...so...the poems start with the next post...my turn to place my head on the chopping block!

---Joe

[BLAYAC: Okay, this isn't as bad as I remember it, but you can definitely tell this is the work of an amateur. For one thing the legs don't seem to have any structure to them and the tail looks as if someone stapled it on the thing's backside (anyone else think the thing is minus an ass?). You can also tell that I wasn't very experienced yet at shading either. The picture looks as if it is waiting for a kid with a box of crayons to come by and color it. But I'm not looking to put myself down too much with these early drawings, so I'll close by saying that I do like the way the head is drawn, particularly the eyes and slightly open beak.]

The First Year

This is an impressive page! I love the layout...and you gotta admit, the sentence structure rocks!

The idea of this book was to include some poems from freshman to senior year. The years were identified with these Roman numerals.

This can mean only one thing...we are getting closer to seeing some poetry...and more art!

The Introduction

This is the introduction page. Duh you say! Good for you! Sometimes I like to state the obvious. Like...you probably can't make out what it says! Ha! It's for the best really. It mostly says, "Blah blah blah blah!"

Ok...read the Hello post on this blog again. That is what it mostly says.

There is also a dedication portion...dedicated to Joyce Devine, my little sister who left this life too soon, Victor DesLauriers, my grandfather who passed on the year before I put this book together, and Darren Parsons, who helped encourage me to put this book together.

Looking at this page now, I wish I'd had it illustrated. This page is so barron and lifeless. I've never been very good and writing introductions so the blame is solely mine.

There ya have it...Intros!

I should point out that most of my drawings you will be seeing on this site are over ten years old. Personally, I cringe whenever I look at them. I can do so much better now, but Joe wishes to show both the progression of the artist as well as the writer, so I will grin and bare it. The first book "An Apparition or Two" was created around 1993 or 1994, when Joe and I were just pups. We had met each other not too long ago through fellow Apparition artist Dar Parsons, and I was only supposed to provide some fill-in work on the project to help Dar along because of his tendency to draw really, really slowly. In all fairness Dar was in the middle of shooting his film short "Laugh A Little" which was consuming a lot of his time (the film went on to win best in the state of Indiana, by the way). Though to this day I still don't understand why it was so hard for him to produce at least a page or two a month for Joe, who was his best friend at the time. As it is I ended up illustrating nearly the entire book with Dar coming in at the end and providing some quick pictures that does not stand up at all to the quality of work in which he in capable. I know Joe was agitated with this hasty "I just want to get it over and done with" work, as was I, because I didn't think my own illustrations, which tended to border more on the comic-bookish in those days, gave the right feel to Joe's dark, almost dream-like prose. My work on the second book "In the Blackness I laugh" is much better, more in tune with Joe's writing--though I still have my misgivings with the finished work on my end there as well, but we'll get to that in due time.

--Blayac

An Apparition or Two-cover

This is the cover. It was illustrated by Darren Parsons. I don't tell the artists what to draw. I just told him the title and let his imagination do the rest.

I think he did a good job here. The readers looked at it and were like, "What the heck is that? What awaits on the inside pages?"

Hello

This is my poem blog. Hello people. I will start by putting up my first poem book. How unlucky for you and me. I wrote all of them that will appear first in high school. It is not very good...but is my first attempt at a book of poetry. The reason I have decided to do that is...I hope to show the progression of a poet.  This will also show the progression of the illustrator.  My good friend Blayac is the man I go to for artwork.  If I’m not mistaken, this was the first book of poetry he illustrated.  He is the sole illustrator for the second book that will appear…In the Blackness I Laugh.  This little exercise has probably been done somewhere before...deal with it. Hopefully, the progression will go from bad to not so good to he's getting better and maybe someday he will be good.

Ok...the first book is called An Apparition or Two. It is illustrated mainly by my good friend Blayac. Other artists include, Darren Parsons...John Iverson...and Matt Schick.

While I was not happy with the overall finished project, it was the stepping-stone to bigger and better things. I would still like to go back, with Blayac's help, and improve it.

It is what it is. Enjoy!