Sam+Lovett-Perkins













I try to base my poems around my own personality, which more often then not is a darker one. The emotion that I channel into my poems is //“waiting”//. A feeling of anxiousness, like something is supposed to be happening, is often how I feel in my life, so I put it into my poems. This isn’t always the case as in “How I was Raised” by it is true of my Sonnet and “Liberation”. I enjoy right free style above all else because it leave a poem open. I also draw inspiration from the things around me that affect me. For example in “Liberation” I’m talking about a day when homophobia doesn’t exist because people decide to stand up to defend themselves or others. This comes from the ongoing battle that people in the LGBTQ community are doing. All my life I’ve been surrounded by the LGBTQ community and grown up in it. When I write I type my thoughts, as I think them, and just keep going. In the end I’m left with a page full of words strung together which is when I go back and remove what is unnecessary. By doing this it lets me get all of what I’m thinking out, all of the feeling I put into my poems, instead of limiting it and forcing them to be. Writing with a rhyme scheme, I often need to stop, and think about the words so that they rhyme, stopping my train of thought. Finally one of the things I like to do is make metaphors. Long metaphors are fun to think about, as I think it out my mind makes connections to how one instance or object is like another. I pull form all these tools to help me write a meaning full cohesive piece of poetry.



=Poem: Brad Pitt= With cotton candy armpits and sugary Crevices, sweat glazing your donut skin. Have you ever been fat, Brad? Have you ever wanted a Snickers More than love and lain on your bed While the phone rang and rolled one On your tongue, afraid to eat it, afraid It would make your jeans too tight? Have you Barfed, Brad, because you ate it, Ate all the take-out, licked Brown sauce off the box while you sobbed? Brad Pitt down in the pits chaining menthol Ciggys in your thick-wallet life, It’s not so bad Brad, sad Brad, is it?

=Deeper Understanding:= This poem uses a questioning tone and the reader's understanding of celery culture through the image of Brad Pitt, to describe how the media idolizes its stars making themes seem less human. This poem is broken into three parts each referring to three separate instances of how the speaker struggles with an eating disorder. Smith takes a reader into the mind of the speaker by showing them how the speaker sees, "Sugary crevices sweat glazing your donut skin", is a metaphor that is comparing Brad Pitts body to a donut, both of which are something that is craved by the speaker. The pain of the speaker is expressed by putting down Brad Pitt through the questions they ask. "Have you ever felt Brad?", gives off a tone of jealousy that the speaker is feeling. By ending a line with a question it allows the power of the previous lines to manifest inside the head of the reader, this is extremely powerful after "Barfed Brad?, because you ate it, ate all the take-out, licked brown dace off the box while you sobbed?" This reviles a strong image of pain and unhappiness, the question mark enhances by leaving it open for the readers mind to explore. The speakers ending sums up their feelings on the subject, by placing commas in strategic places, and forcing the reader to slow down to savor each last word.

=Poem: The Bar Closes (But You Don’t Want to Go Home)= While the man you love bites stories into someone else’s back, there’s a flicker in your eye only seen in late-night

television (the heroine stretching her face, half- grin, half-cry), all you’ve done wrong clarified in a liquidy theme song.

You say, the only party is my party, the only death worth dying is the disastrous one. If everything was black and white,

darling, the world would look more like an afterlife, certain and grand and unexplainable. But even the shoreline

against the city tonight is indecisive, jagged and rocky the way desire used to be before you knew enough to know it was desire.

=Deeper Understanding:= The poem uses the complex emotion of desire to show how humans use each other to fill that need. The first stanza's is a warning that references to a relationship that has been abused. Warning a woman of the desire of the man,she loves, who's making love to someone else. The metaphor "there's a flicker in you eye only seen in late-night television (the heroine stretching her face, half grin, half cry), all you've done wrong clarified in a liquify theme song", refers to how the actions of the man resemble a black and white t.v. sitcom.Where the watcher is the original woman who knows that the faithful man is cheating. This leads to another metaphor "you say, the only party is my party, and the only death worth dying is a disastrous one" which is basically telling the reader and explaining the actions of the cheater, he wants to live life dangerously to fulfill his desire. A repetitive naughty act where the she knows what is going on, but not to ruin what fake relationships they have, to fill her desire. The first The indecisive shoreline remarks on the complexities of this emotion, how it is not black or white but it is grayed. This poem is a reflection on the desires of the woman being warned. How her desires have changed like how she describes the shoreline "…indecisive, jagged and rocky". Her feelings have changed from loving this man, to wanted to preserve the love my looking the other way while he's unfaithful.

= = = = =Poem: Make Him Think You Could Pull a Gun= Make him think you’re crazy, make him think you could pull a gun. He’ll remember you this way. Men respond to grand gestures,

men respond, in their deepest parts, to fear. Tell him you’ve met before, you’re sure of it, you never forget a face

twisted in pleasure, panic. Watch his mouth dissolve, watch it betray him. Show him a knife, slicing a body (more surprise than pain), the mirrored

blade, the skin. He’ll pretend he’s comfortable, that you really don’t scare him. But it’s all anxious lie. You’ve seen the movies,

and every scene is your scene: the psycho singing love songs to the man he loves, blood, a perfect sunset, on the dead mother’s cheek—

you can taste that light. Tell him nobody belongs to him more than you. Let him think he has some room. Let him think he can choose.

= = =Deeper Understanding:= In this poem Aaron Smith uses a strategic placement of lines in a how-to fashion, that gives the reader a inside into the speakers mind. This poem shows the speakers connection to this man and what he means to him. This poem is a how-to that shows a progressing story to how the speaker wants wants to achieve their love, ending like how the poem begins, with a shot of a bullet. "Make him think you could pull a gun" at the beginning gives the poem a kind of serious tone. As the poem continues it continues to the "Slicing of skin". Finally near the end the speaker even refers to themselves as a psycho, "The psycho singing love songs t the man he loves, blood, a perfect sunset, on the dead mothers cheek-". It shows how this seemingly obsession has evolved. But the ending calms the oncoming climax, "Let him think he can choose", meaning that he has the choice to control this obsession. Allowing him to pull the imaginary trigger on this obsession.