XPI Student Showcase
Welcome to Xpress Plugged In, our new online gallery of student expressions. Please follow the submission instructions CAREFULLY. New work will be posted every Monday.
-- Nancy Green, editor of XPI
Selections for the Week of 1/17/2011
Spotlight on Alex Gagnon and Cory Draper, 10th grade
Nature Coast Technical High School, Brooksville
(Part Two)
Cory and Alex on Cory and Alex ...
Our names are Cory Draper and Alex Gagnon. We're sophomores at Nature Coast Technical High School in Brooksville, Florida. We both love graphic arts and design, and take a commercial arts course together at our school. We also love to express ourselves: in physical art, digital art, and in writing (Cory). Cory's favorite hobby is writing, and he hopes to become a full-time author one day. Sometimes we do illustrations together for the stories and the poetry he writes. We know you'll enjoy our creations.
Art and poetry by Cory Draper and Alex Gagnon, 10th grade,
Nature Coast Technical High School, Brooksville, Florida
The Rose I, digital editing and design, Alex Gagnon
Eternity Cover, digital editing and design, Cory Draper
They Lie to Me
They tell me I'm creative.
They lie.
They tell me I could paint an extravagant, newly-defined world
with the power of
my own hand.
They lie more.
They say my thoughts run
in sophisticated strings of authenticity and independence
that spark the light
and curiosity of souls.
They continue to lie.
They pretend to recognize my face slowly deteriorating
in the shadows of a
miserable seclusion,
But they only look in the mirror at themselves
with stupid blind superciliousness
and the courage of a cold-hearted monster.
They merely mock me.
I can't take their lying.
It's more than my emotions and lack of self-indulgence can bear,
to the extremes of a crumbling moon.
I tell them that I will run through the darkening skies
and erase the clouds from above their
arrogant heads.
They laugh.
I tell them that I will return as a lightning bolt of tarnish and indignation
and strike them with
fierce fanatical revenge.
They laugh harder.
They laugh so hard that the air rains in their own disdain
and mindless delight.
But then,
They look in the mirrors again
and see the world I have potentially painted
reflecting in their ignorant repulsive eyes.
I watch them for some time in their own ungratefulness
and dumb, expressionless individuality.
They practically drown in it.
I draw new faces on them and their eyes
are open to everything my imagination
and absolute pity for them has conceived.
Now I am the one laughing,
the only one.
And it is the most flourishing, maniacal roar
the ears of my alleged skies have ever heard.
They beg me for sympathy
with words buried beneath
gurgles of retaliated false claims and retorts.
I do not hear them.
But I do tell them,
Never again will they lie to me.
-- Cory Draper
Snow with No Limits, digital editing and design, Alex Gagnon
Zombie Apocalypse, digital editing and design, Cory Draper
That Heart So Dull
The more faces that I see,
the more I wonder how they sleep.
What it would be like to stand over them
like a looming shadow in their most vulnerable of moons.
To be there in all my consciousness
and yet be unseen in the shadows of their dreams,
their faces turned toward me so precisely and hauntingly,
yet so mindlessly and mentally unaware,
that the drum of my ecstatic heartbeat in their ears
would remain undetected.
I would see them,
They would not see me.
It would be of the highest honor
to see even the most despicable of hearts
at rest in such a state of divine equality and weakness.
Where in that night,
I am the only outcast...
An outcast of power.
-- Cory Draper
Global Warming, digital editing and design, Alex Gagnon