Words of a Poet

Loves Deceit is a poem by Big Rube that was recited on the movie ATL. It’s been a popular poem on our site and many of our readers have read this poem. One reader, Holden, commented “can someone explain this poem to me in depth please? and yes i know it has to do with love.” So I decided to break down the poem by paragraph. My analysis of the poem will be in italics.

“Loves Deceit”

Pleasure turns to the pain,
Of the lessons learned from the strain,
Of the questions burned in my brain,
About whether to love is humane
In its touch.

The good feeling of love is gone, and now it hurts. From heartbreak lessons of life are learned, discovering how much love can hurt. Love is pain, is it right to feel this bad?

These thoughts are like salmon
Swimming upstream
In the tears of your deceit,
Fighting the current hurt
That kills more than is created
By the chaos of our intertwined emotions:
Chaotic because the anchor
Of Eros’ arrow has been plucked from the vessel
Of my undying infatuation.

The thoughts of the broken love are difficult to comprehend, almost impossible. It’s like fish swimming the wrong way, impossible. The feeling of a lost love doesn’t make sense, emotions running wild. Eros, the Greek god of love and sexual desire, now gone. Sort of like removing a love connection made by Cupid (Eros is less cliche then cupid, makes the poem a bit better).

Separation not as simple as the distance between us,
My mind no longer possessed
By the demons
That had been the overseers
Of my enslavement to your lies.

Being apart from love isn’t as simple as something like time or distance, it’s more complex. However, no longer being in love has made it possible to get away from the person and lies.

The seeds of these lies,
Rooted so deeply
They have cracked the foundation
Of what we once shared,
Allowing the faith in us I had sealed inside
To gush out like a river,
Ripping the image of our future together
From my thoughts
As violently and as brutally
As if it were a child being taken
From his mother’s arms.

The lies broke us apart, they ruined the relationship and the love that used to be there. He thought the love would survive but after it didn’t he let the thought go. To let in the pain that was unbearable, referencing a child being separated from his mother. Separating something that isn’t meant to be apart.

I’m left surrounded in darkness,
But I refuse to be swallowed by it,
My loneliness like the night air.
Invisible to the eye, oblivious to the touch,
In its cold uncomfortableness.

Now alone, but fighting against the loneliness. Refusing to give into the pain. It’s overwhelming but able to be hidden.

Yet if I could do it all over again,
I’d do it in the same skin I’m in.
To lay down and let love die,
Just stay down and let love lie:
No, no, not I.
I’ll stay ’round and let love fly,
Even though I have seen its darkest form, deceit.
Nothing else could taste this warm
Or feel this sweet.

But if it could be done all over again, it would be done exactly the same. Basically “its better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”. At the end they still believe in love and they’d never surrender that feeling. Even though the end result was heartbreak, it was “warm and sweet” while it lasted.

by Big Rube
interpreted by Matthew Henrickson