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

In Finding Fish by Antwone Fisher, the major decisions Antwone makes in his youth helps him become a successful person. Antwone grew up as a foster child and took care of himself. He didn’t understand these concepts of “foster”. “For a long time we never heard anything about the Pickett’s being foster parents and there was no question but that they were our mother and father.” (Fisher 53). He was constantly abused physical and mentally with no positive reinforcement. No matter how hard life gets, Antwone still works through it.

Leaving the Pickett house was the first decision he made that would help him greatly in the future. He basically had to brainwash himself. To succeed he has to forget everything Ms. Pickett, his foster mother, has told him. “Like that person who lies so much about something he eventually doesn’t know the truth of it anymore, I saw that if I could learn to convince others that my future wasn’t hopeless, in time I could convince myself.” (238). Antwone gets so used to being abused physically and mentally, he gets a very low self-esteem. After awhile the physical abuse wasn’t as bad as the mental abuse. Finally Antwone fights back against Ms. Pickett. When he is kicked out, he takes his opportunity to get out of there.

At sixteen years old, capable of making his own decisions, he attends the rest of high school at reform school. Even though he didn’t do anything wrong it offered child care services. He knows school is important so he jumps a grade to finish by the time he is eighteen. Being on his own he learns what he needs to do. “When you’re eighteen, you’ll be on your own. You need to have a plan.” (243). His only plan is to get his diploma. “By Christmastime, I had succeeded in earning the right to graduate with the seniors.” (255). After graduation, with his adolescence ending and no plan on what to do, Antwone is alone once again in the world.

Antwone returns to Cleveland and begins delivering drugs for a drug dealer he met. He knows he has to get out and far from there. “And at the bottom, in bold, inviting type, was the phrase that really got me: Join the Navy, See the World.” (281). The navy is everything that Antwone needs. It provides him a home, money, and a chance to get out of where he was, far away. It is his perfect escape. Not only was the navy all of those things but it helped his self-esteem. “But boot camp gave me a new self-image. I found out that I was average, academically and athletically.” (287). All of his life he was told he was worth nothing, and he was nothing. The navy showed him otherwise.

Antwone becomes successful on his own decisions. Basically alone all of his life he still manages to survive and succeed. He accomplishes everything that he needs and wants to accomplish. After the military he finds his family and makes one of his own. Nonetheless, he is happy.

Since then he has written great poetry like Who Will Cry For the Little Boy. His poetry book is very meaningful and I would recommend it to everyone.

Written by Matthew Henrickson