This post is late because I haven't been allowed to used the computer at all since at least three days (or more) before break started...


Commentary: Animal Farm Project

I decided to write a poem, in all honesty, because I ran out of time. I had planned to make a movie, but schedule conflictions and a resulting lack of time made it impossible to make a quality project. And here we are!

I chose the theme “Power Corrupts” for a couple reasons. Firstly, it was my…“best” theme, because I had paid more attention to it than any of the others. I started to look at all the options, and decided my best chance was with power corrupts. When writing a poem (at least for me), I find it REALLY frustrating when I’m given a creative project, but I have guidelines that leave me no room for…creativity with content, just with word choice. PC is a really open ended theme: It only has two words, a sure sign of…open ended-ness, and because of this, it’s very unspecific. It leaves most of the thinking and planning and structure to the author, and as long as your poem is built around this central idea and it all wraps up at the end, whatever you want to put down will work.
My poem starts off sounding like…any other poem, though not necessarily about power (a few people said it sounded like a poem by an ex-drug addict). It first talks about a “drug” (power), and how it can effect (or is it affect?) you. It then moves on to compare the effects in real life to those on Animal Farm, and how the pigs reacted in comparison with how a person would (theoretically) react.

The final stanza (more of a sentence) reveals what the "drug"is and what, in essence, it does to one who gets a taste of it.

Keenan

POEM BELOW

A heart, cremated in a searing fire,

And drowning in a well of sorrowful tears,

Now feel the icy tendrils of desire,

Which smother the mind in shattered dreams and fears,

And like a drug, one taste is all it takes,

To plant the seed inside your now damned soul,

And then it drives you past the breaking point,

And buries you alive in a self-dug hole,

You wear a mask of cruelty, and this drug made this true,

You notice only things that seem to make life better for you,

You sink to lower levels, to reach a higher place,

A false sense of reality, paints pictures on your face,

And like the pigs on Animal Farm, what you have is never enough,

And you will exploit any and all, to get a bit more of the stuff,

It’s clenched inside your fist now, you take it without a second thought,

You build upon what you already have,

And you thicken the sinister plot,

Of what your life has been so absorbed with since you had your first taste,

Power, it is a corrosive rust upon your heart and soul, it corrupts the morals, and kills the senses, surrounds you with one central goal: Get more.