If only I was him, accepting when it all comes together, not regretting when it all comes apart, that natural progression life makes us endure, if I was him, I could close my eyes, feel her presence, accept her presents, and be grateful for having something I never had before, and never have a gain. If I was him, I'd be eternally grateful.
A poem she posted just about the time she started working at our office reflect many of the themes she would expand upon over the next year and a half: starting over and getting what she thinks she deserves.
After more than a year of unemployment, failed opportunities and a spoiled romance, she is looking for a chance to hear “the wounds and worries of past dismay.”
Then, from then on, she engaged a new face of “confidence and reticence” and by adopting this new face she can somehow get the “charge required” in order to start over and actually see it through to an acceptable conclusion: “This time.”
Almost to the day a year later, she would post a poem about not having what it takes to see this current thing through, somewhat ironic bookend to her employment at our office, and how she ended up where she started, an oft repeated pattern of behavior she engaged in long prior to her coming with us.
In her poem in October 2011, she hoped her new start would lead to “lasting consequences,” so she could live the dreams she’s long desired: fame, success, reward, possibly love or at least and affair free of drama.
Like Atlas, she needs to “heave the weight of several worlds and several thousand soul” along the path unfurled before her, “in order to make sense” and get what is overdue her. “See the fruits and labor of labored years and see how love has helped “us” heal.
Again, we get the plural pronoun “us,” suggesting that along with the new career there may be a budding romance as well, and hints at just how early she may have gotten involved with RR – since she cannot reflect on any ongoing relationship at the office.
She seems to tie in her hopes for a successful romance with a new and emerging career.
With these high hopes, she projects her finally getting what she wanted, when in the past she has been denied, though she also suggests she might still have to move heaven and earth to get ahead on that yellow brick road to success.
Having skimmed over this poem early on, I will now have to take a closer look at the poem she posted a year later in which she refers to herself as the bringer of bad luck, taking blame for something she clearly was blameless in, unless, of course, she was more intimately involved in RR’s plot for revenge than I originally assumed.
The two poems posted a year apart reflect the hopes she had going into her career with us, and the utter despair she felt when the Small Man confronted her and forced her to quit.
This idea of permanence, of endurance, of assurance caught up in each embrace, only to have it all crumble apart by midnight when the couch turns back into a pumpkin and her horses back to mice.
"Some chicks had being tied down to one man," my back doctor said as she cracked my back, the rush of revelation like a hit of heroin in my head, Cinderella isn't her, it's me, leaving one glass shoe behind.
Going back to poetry written before I came on her radar provides clues to how she thinks and foreshadows a bit of what came later after we came together.
A whole month prior to that fateful text in the middle of the night she posted a poem that laid out much of what her life was about to that point.
The opening line to the poem posted on the 20th in February 2012 makes reference to Amy Mann a well-established alternative rock performer who a critic once claimed explores depressing themes while transcending the self-pity so associated with love sick laments, an artist that writes about underdogs, misfits, loves lost and outsiders.
Mann is best known for writing songs about dark subjects though often humorous as well and full of sarcasm.
the fact that she our poet is reaching out to Mann in this poem suggests that there is some kind of connection and highlights her own questioning of romance, suggesting that such things are not the happy affairs most love songs imply.
When does it all stop? When does she wise up?
She says she has no answers, and thinks “the wiser I get, the worse I fair.”
She keeps getting into he lives of strangers, meeting them at a time when they seem to be in the midst of crisis.
“A fall apart cross roads, as they crash into her, and when they realize what they’ve done, they pick up and run.”
Did she say too much or not enough? Did she chase them away?
On the other hand, are those who “cling.”
Hard.
She runs from them.
So, regardless, someone is always out of breath and not in a good way. She obviously prefers getting out of breath making love.
What she wants is to bump into someone who is in the same place as she is, where she can stand up straight and get some momentary rest from the drama before she must plunge back into the real world again.
She apparently had seen enough of this pattern to become sick of it, needing for all of it to “quiet down” - that hamster wheel in her brain “full of its own endless banter and chewed up distortions” of everything that had ever been said to her throughout her life.
She calls this a state of peace, “liquid quiet” in which her heart doesn’t palpitate out of her chest so hard she needs to meditate just to keep from shaking.
But she said she can’t find peace even in meditation, full of desperation.
“I wish I could begin my days with a sense of normalcy,” rather than having “to claw and spit up to a place” where she can function without falling on the floor.
Such panic apparently routinely ruins here attempts to even put on eye liner.
All this months before what eventually transpired between us, something of a foreshadowing of what was to come.
At this point, she makes reference to the ironic nature of her job at our office “creating and writing other people’s life,” which makes up her life, but not really her own life, a strange “metal life” that is both a privilege and a source of complete exhaustion.
But she ends the poem on a positive not that she hasn’t yet given up hope.
The enlightening thing revealed in this poem is the fact that she appears not to be seeking love, but rather a tolerable companionship, someone she can be with who is on a similar level of emotional stability, where she can get out of breath in a good way, and still get peace and quiet, inside and out.
She desires to be with someone she can co-habit with, lacking the turmoil that scares potential candidates away or has them clutching at her like needy children.
This poem comes just prior to the one-eyed jack poem, a revelation I largely missed, and so did not realize what she had hoped to achieve when she reached out to me, “don’t try to save me,” being the operative words, and suggesting she did not wish to change who she is, but rather merely seeking someone who is neither scared of her or so utterly infatuated as to smother her.
I’ll return to this poem in the future to look more closely at how it is reflected in her later poems.
Hair brushes should come with a warning label on how they ought to get used, which end inserted where and why, and the dangers likely if the wrong end goes in when the other end should have. This desperate need for pleasure always tinged with the possibility of pain, and the satisfaction both of these brings when done correctly, though I'm sure those who inverted the hair brush did not contemplate where either end would end up or the motivation to insert it into the dark spaces meant for something else. These, of course, being the thoughts that ran through my head when she informed me about her use of the brush, and making me wonder why she needed to tell me. It is possible to be jealous of a hair brush?
What she wants out of life I can't rightly say, fame, prestige, fortune power, all those things she can't simply get by making a wish and clicking the heals of her ruby shoes, even if she once played the role when she was in high school.
Maybe it is because the wizard she seek is as help as the one the movie portrays, or the evil witch's broom is far too out of reach, the army of monkeys too powerful., and those three companions lacking brain or brawn or bravado to help her accomplish what she needs, her yellow brick road so full of twists and turns , she often finds herself back where she started in the land of munchkins, who love her but can't help her survive
I wrote about this poem about a year ago when she first posted in in May 2012, and I’m most certain it is the second people she wrote about our temporary boss, and further shows how she trickled up from me to him, and in this is a more direct suggest that their relationship went beyond celibate friendship, although not yet definitive proof.
As pointed out in my previous observation, he appears to be curled up beside her in bed, a reassuring presents she claims as a blue ribbon, and whose voice she was uncertain about when he first became boss. She had asked me about him, questioned how roughly he had treated her, as if he needed to put her in his place, a cub, while he played boss.
“What does it mean?” she asked me. “Why is he singling me out?”
His tough boss attitude might well have been a cover for his attract to her, something I believe she fully understood even when she asked me about it.
The voice of reprimands she first encounter, yet she says she could not tell if it was good or bad or indifferent.
“Or worse, of no importance,” she wrote, when clearly she needed to feel important and bring him into her world, having him curl up against her, this prize she so much sought after and finally won.
The tone is the poem is not arrogance, as I thought when I first read it, but of relief of finally finding someone who legitimately cares about her and interpretation I did not make when first reading this a year ago.
Back then, I was too cynical to believe he meant anything other than the next step in her trickling her ay up the ladder to personal success.
There is great weariness in her words, and a sense of peace in having his body against her, the world – her world – wearing away, but more slowly than she does, implying she has grown weary of all the conflicts.
This is the poem that eventually made me want to confide in our Temporary boss, telling me that he had experienced some of the same issues with her that I had experienced, and that he had taken on the role as he protector, something other poems suggested she craved, while at the same time, she also desperately needed to feel strong and independent in her own right.
There is too much a gap between her posting this poem in May 2012 and the love poems she posted earlier this year to believe he is the subject of the later poems as well.
Although he still remains her confidant, his close relationship seemed to wain when he was forced to step down as temporary boss when the real boss returned from her maternity leave – something I suspect she expected and why she also developed a relationship with the owner around this same time.
This is not to say the poem lacked sincerity. If something I learned after a year of reading and writing about her poetry is her ability to mean something until it comes too inconvenient at which point she stops.
Since to date, she seems not to have posted additional poems that reference him, I assume she moved on from him, partly because of the seeds of mistrust I sewed when I talked to him about her, and she began to question her need of him even as a mentor.
But at this point in time, she sincerely seems to admire him, a first prize ribbon who curls up against her in bed, protective and attractive, someone she won over and for that moment, instead to keep.
She posted her first poem about our temporary boss in early May 2012, one more sign of her moving on, a sign I missed just ahead of my birthday, when I had assumed all was still relatively well between us.
She had already shared a number of stories with him partly based on her research into his background and the book he had recently published
she knew he had this thing for needy girls and found the topic of the mob in New Jersey fascinating
he had had dealings with the mob and his youth her past played into both of these things as well as his need to serve as a mentor to some young writer
he took very seriously her fear of her stalker from Brooklyn and took charge in making sure she was protected if something happened asking the receptionist in our office to put a photo of the man on our company server
the first clue about her interest in him came when I got to her apartment and found his book on her bed instead of mine a book that provided more insight into him than in than mine did and prompted her to ask me he's really screwed up when it comes to women isn't he
indeed his book resembled a number of books I wrote about the women in my life a bit too revealing especially when it served the purposes of a social engineer looking to trickle up in our company
how involved she got with him I still don't know jealousy made me think the worst although logistics worked against any affair between them being done easily partly because he didn't drive and would have needed to have someone pick him up or him to take public transportation to get to her apartment
it is difficult to picture him waiting nervously on a corner a few blocks from his home for her to come collect him
I suspect that he did go to her apartment as others before him had part of a ritual of temporary romance she had perfected me picturing again pictures she sent me of her friends there her poem of course is more than just about him the ability to once again get out from under the burden of self-imposed guilt he no doubt celebrating her rather then putting her down rather than confirming the dark self-image she had maintained about herself prior to this although told in one stanza that her poem might be divided into several parts the first of which explores the theme of self-accusation she would later explore in more depth in her fair unfair poem where she takes stock of her life and comes to realize she was an error in blaming herself and dares to reexamine her life with the able health of someone who is kind enough to tell enough to try enough to care enough to be enough to prove to her that she was right all I may be wrong in assuming this person in her life is our temporary plus yet the timing of the poem suggests that it is because it comes at a time when he had taken on the role as her mentor and was guiding her through her troubled life with a stalker
This came prior to my confrontation with her the leaving her at the bar and later meeting him in the park where I confided in him about her he appears to be the person who has adopted her and was helping her to deal with the emotional turmoil of her life in another slightly later poem she would make reference to him as the person who knew the right combination to unlock her deepest secrets
although they remain friends to this day his influence over her and her references to him in her poems was short lived and her interest in him seems to have faded once he lost his position as temporary boss when the full time boss returned from her maternity leave
I'm not saying her interest in him was merely because of the power he wielded and that she sought to use him the timing and her apparent move on to the owner make it look as if she had used him
if anything I have learned from a year of dissecting her poetry is that she is sincere right up to the point when she no longer needs to be and she may well have meant every word before she moved on to someone else
Although I should know better, I can’t help; think she may have responded to a cover tune I posted, since her poem uses some of the same language as the song did; or possibly pure coincidence.
“Every day, my mind is all around you, looking out from my lonely room, day after day,” the song goes. “I remember holding you while you sleep.
“I breathe deeply, and I feel you all around me…and hear you as I fall asleep.”
Lingering a bit on this poem, she seems to be reflecting on some peaceful moment – “They’ve calmed, the throes of wanting as this thing has levelled out.”
Again, we get possible double meaning – “throes of wanting,” could be her wonton self or her trickle up aspirations,” which leave her into a bit of the unknown, or a plane of its own.
This desire, of course, is always there, in what she calls “the Floaty space” between head and heart.”
And then makes a reference that seems odd, talking about “the other two” that transverse the realer planes of existence.
She likely refers to the concept of “Body, head, heart and soul,” so that while her head and heart are in conflict, her body and soul move on, dealing with reality.
This appears to continue aspects of the love poems (as I pointed out in another journal entry on this poem), his scent lingering in her bed so that when she breathes deeply, she feels him all around her, again seeming to reflect the song I posted: “I remember holding you while you sleep,” in the song, as opposed to, “I see you when I close my eyes and hear you as I fall asleep.”
Tied to my performance or not, the poem clearly struggles with the absence of his body in her life, his presence that is all around her.
There is a sense that she is trying to lure her lover back after the throes of wanting have calmed, looking for his arms to hold her perhaps, or his company in a lonely room.
Again, it is difficult to know who she means in these poems, yet there is a suggestion that she is safe to be around her again, and her ambitions have leveled out.
Because of the similarities between poem and song, I’d like to think that she may be sending a message, though I think she has shown the tendency to throw in a line or two in poems that are relevant to some people and not to others, a kind of tease to keep all those who are following her thinking she is writing the poem about them.
I suspect this may also be a reflection of her own faults, believing some things that are about her when they are not. And I also suspect that she will spend hours sorting through someone’s words in order to come up with a true meaning.
I remember her going over a long text message from her Brooklyn stalker, inserting her own meaning on his words, and I think she does this a lot when it comes to what I post, and perhaps even now, she is responding to my song thinking it means something I never intended.
In re-reading my poetry journal recently, I was alarmed to find that the competition between me and her at the office began a lot sooner than I originally thought – as early as mid-April 2012 when the space shuttle arrived in the area to become part of the air and space museum in Manhattan.
She took an amazing photo from some point along the Hudson River waterfront, a shot to be proud of – only to get outdone by an accidental shot I took when the shuttle on the back of airliner – flew over a local bridge, making it look it was part of rush hour traffic.
After more than a year and all that has happened since, it is difficult to know if she took offense, or if she even considered it a competition, friendly or not.
Later on, the competition became obvious – at least to me, in regard to hits on the company website her stories achieved each week.
At some point, I started to notice how many of her stories became the top viewed stories, and I began to suspect they were being manipulated by having someone and perhaps others repeatedly hit on those stories to achieve that distinction. As an experiment, I did the same thing for several of my stories, using various phones and computers in order to vary the IP addresses.
Yet each time I managed to get a story on the top spot, in flooded hits that promptly pushed her story or stories above mine.
At one point, I began to think promoting my own stories was a little too obvious; so, I promoted the stories of another writer instead. Yet as before, as soon as one of these stories reached the most watched, in flooded support for one of her stories putting her back on top.
Finally, the owner – who tracks all these things – caught on and shut down the hits on her stories as well as those I was promoting, ending this apparent attempt to impress the owners as to how popular her stories were.
RR, of course, became a valuable sources for a number of her scoops, as did the stuff given to us by the Private Eye looking to bring down the Neighboring Mayor, although I suspect more went on between her and the Neighboring Mayor than I’ll ever know.
Her bringing down the congressman on behalf of RR was supposed to have been her crowning glory, even though others RR had approached with the same information said he never delivered on what he said he had. Even the owner questioned me about whether I thought RR worked for the FBI (and his involvement with her should have made him more receptive.) Other writers working for us in the past, believed RR had invented most of the things he said, myths he told to impress other people, especially women, about his working on secret missions (to explain his absences for weeks at a time).
RR and the Virgin Mayor may well have been behind her attempts to bring down others besides the congressman and the Neighboring Mayor, including the director of the Housing Authority, the chief of staff to the Small Man, the Freeholder, and others – part of a plot, too, to install one of RR’s henchmen as the county prosecutor.
At times, I suspected RR used her as a puppet. But as naïve as she sometimes seemed, she was far smarter than those who might use her, and it is more likely, she used RR and others in her campaign for self-promotion, looking to make herself look good and perhaps use one of these things as a platform to launch a more illustrious career with some institution such as the New York Times or NBC TV – to which she had connections.
Instead of being manipulated as I first believed, she may well simply have been exploiting them to achieve her ultimate goals and may well have seen me as getting in her way.
Looking back over the last year. I realized I have not written so much about one person since my best friend died and I began to put together a history of his life.
To write about someone extensively. I have to be inspired by that person on some level.
I don't even write a lot about those women I claim to have loved and the bulk of what I have written has been primarily about three women in my life my ex-wife and my childhood sweetheart Peggy the stripper and now this poet.
Because my ex-wife was my first serious love and me because we experienced so much together during our time as a couple I have written massively about her in poetry. Journals. short stories and novels -- maybe 15 novels all totaled and well more than 100 short stories even a few songs.
Peggy. the stripper. dominated my journal for a while -- much of which went into creating two novels. some poetry and a number of songs because she was so much into my performing for her.
After a year now I can honestly say the poet inspired me, too although most of the journal became a kind of therapy for me, an attempt to understand her and my reaction to her.
By far the most talented person since my best friend, trying to understand her became a literary science her poetry providing an Avenue into her soul and a rare phenomena that most people don't get to experience.
Dissecting her poetry, however, is among the biggest challenges I've had since college.
My journal has been hey combination of documenting my experiences and a lesson in poetics.
I have written a poetry journal that is partly about her.
In the journal, I have been forced to retract some conclusions I had about her work and will still likely require more revisions in the future, a significant challenge and at times a humbling experience especially at those times when her insight and conclusions show me up and reveal how -- even at my age -- how childish I am.
How much more I will write in these journals depends on her though, as time advances I have less and less direct experience to convey except in retrospect and rely more and more on her poetry and I suspect when she ceases to post poems I will cease writing about her.
I have intentionally avoided writing songs about her -- the way I had for Peggy and for my ex-wife -- primarily because she is a musician and my creations aren't good enough or on the same level as hers.
I can hold my own in poetry and writing and photography to some degree. I would be a embarrassed to craft music so much in inferior to hers.
Of the three women I have written about extensively, the poet is the most complex for a number of reasons, partly because of duality of who she is inside and what she allows to reveal of herself to the general public.
I know more about her than I have any right to know, and yet, I know nothing.
She is much more mystery than any woman I’ve known, even those I have invested tens of thousands of pages on.
I don’t know what will become of all this writing, whether I will someday turn it into a non-fiction novel, the way I did for Peggy, and many times with my ex-wife – changing the names, of course, to protect the innocent.
Maybe I’ll do nothing with it all, leave it to rot into dust on my bookshelves, having had the satisfaction of being challenged emotionally and intellectually by a woman – to coin an old cliché – it out of my league.
Ultimately, she will find her place in the world, and will be recognized for her achievements. I doubt, however, I shall live long enough to see it, let alone document it the way I have during this last year.
Anyway, until then, I just keep on keeping on.
A year has passed since the most dramatic events of 2012, one of which was a trip I took to Woodstock and what I posted on my blog when I got back.
The tension a year ago was also tied to my posting of a photo she sent me when she was perched on her roof top.
Both photos so enraged her she even called me demanding I remove them.
The roof top photo has an interesting history because she actually sent it to my phone weeks, maybe even a month, prior to that night she took to the roof top after I stupidly left her at the bar in Hometown.
Like the photo she sent me with her “friends,” the roof top photo was too dark for me to make out until I downloaded it later and lightened it, startled to find her face and the five floor drop to the street behind her.
I had forgotten all about the photo until the day after she freaked out over the bar incident and added it to a poem I posted urging her not to consider leaping off the roof.
She went ape shit and demanded I remove the image, and later posted a poem of her own about intellectual property.
As I said earlier, the time between when she sent me the photo and when she freaked out was about a month, making me wonder later just how many times prior to the night I left her at the bar she had sought refuge on that roof, and to whom she initially meant to send the photo a month earlier when she accidentally sent it to me.
She could not have meat our temporary boss, unless she had focused on him much sooner than I thought.
More than a year later, the reason for her sending me the photo when she did remain an unsolved mystery, perhaps if meant for me, serving as some kind of plea for help, even when her poetry rejected it.
Yet posting it when I did fed into her wrath and her conclusion that I was stealing pieces of her past, intellectual property theft.
The second photo had an equally curious history because it came about from my yearly trip to Woodstock where my poet friend resided for several years, and where she managed to trickle up to management of a popular eatery there.
Normally, I made the trip there in August Рaround the annual anniversary of the famous concert by that name. Although the concert had not taken place in Woodstock village, we knew there would be a musical celebration none of the less, and tried to catch them. This was a ritual that we maintained since the early 1990s. And as usual, I took a significant number of photographs and videos, capturing every small detail I could, fearing something might not be there the next time I came, such as things like the long-gone Tinker Street Caf̩.
When we arrived, we paused at the community center, where one of the vendors pulled me aside and informed me that I “Walked with God,” something I later incorporated into a poem and posted it along with a number of photos I had taken – among which was the sign for the restaurant she previously worked at.
Admittedly, it was a provocative act.
I didn’t go into the restaurant or even talk to anybody who worked there. I hadn’t gone to Woodstock on account of her at all, yet knew when I posted that one particular picture, it would piss her off.
I didn’t know how pissed off she would get until later when she called screaming for me to remove the photo, which I eventually did, damage already done, having escalated our conflict to a new disturbing height, and for which she would never forgive me.
The combination of my posting these two photos, leaving her at the bar, and talking about her to our temporary boss, created a narrative of negativity I could never make amends for regardless of how hard I tried. The icing on the cake came a month later when I foolishly did the most idiotic thing possible when I texted her wishing her a happy birthday.
The Woodstock part of all this contains an even stranger irony in that I had paid Woodstock a visit on the 40th anniversary of the concert where I took the usual photos and videos and later posted a video putting together music audio with images from around the village.
The irony is that she lived there at the time. While the video did not include any place she worked (how could I, I hadn’t even met her at the time), but I used shots from the street near her restaurant, and in some clips, there are women who strongly resemble her, passing the village square where the musicians played.
God only knows what she might have thought if I had posted this video on my blog last year. Would she have accused me of pulling a “Back to the Future,” somehow managing to travel back in time to catch her in the act back then.
Another poem of hers I did not play close enough attention to from back in late April 2012.
It is a poem that suggest growing distance between me and her, thought it is not blatantly a poem written to or about me.
Again, she posted the poem at a time when she was already transitioning from me to our Temporary boss and perhaps to the owner as well.
The poem makes clear how she feels about traditional romance. This should have served me warning since the poem came two weeks prior to my birthday celebration in the Hometown bar when I tired to give her a card and some candy (which she later said, “I don’t eat.”)
The poem makes it clear how she needs to remain independent, a theme she sticks to in many later poems, especially the one in which she referred to the pause she took when her lover wanted to develop a relationship of “we” and she could not let go of “I.”
In her poem, she mentions “false cries of chivalry” and the promises often articulated, and makes clear there are things she must provide for herself.
After more than a year (despite my detailed journals), it is difficult to remember what might have prompted this poem, or even whether or not it comes about from something I said or did. She might well be reacting to something someone else did or said, and not me at all.
The poem employs several plural pronouns – ourselves and we – and this creates a remote tone of voice and avoids the extremely personal “I” keeping the person she is talking to at arm’s length.
This is the antithesis of a love poem, which she says in a remote, also clinical tones, “I don’t need what you have to offer , I can get it for myself.”
A mistaken motion that sets off these false cries of chivalry, seems to inspire a defiant self-reliance.
She refused to accept sweet words of love that had been offered her, and the tone and language suggests she does not believe he is sincere when he says such things. Or perhaps, she suspects some kind of emotional trap, a dependency not needed or wanted from him or anybody else.
This poem seems to carry on from where her hummingbird poem left off and perhaps even makes reference to the one eyed jacks poem even earlier in the year, creating a single narrative – she wants to be accepted as she is, does not need someone even in the name of love to try to change her, and she needs to retain her independence, do for herself rather than depending on false promises some men never actually keep.
She does not want to be saved, does want to be accepted, and insists on standing on her own two feet.
This poem suggests that she does not trust his sincerity.
She clearly distrusts this person to whom she is addressing in the poem.
Again, in hindsight, I was aware of the growing distance between us at this time, distance she was deliberately putting between us. Reading this poem, a year later, it becomes obvious that she had already moved on from me, although I was so caught up in my own foolishness, I missed the important message being sent.
All this, of course, is based on bold assumptions that may or may not be true – something also true of most of these journal entries.
Since she was involved with other people at the time she posted this poem, the poem might be aimed at any one of us, someone else entirely, a phony romantic who wants to absorb her into his life, offering an assortment of incentives most of which she rejects.
Clearly, regardless of whom the poem is aimed at, it is not a positive poem and foreshadows dark days and a desperate need for her to keep her own indent, and not get lost in a seat of phony, disingenuous promises.
Just when you would least expect it, her latest posted poem returns to the love story she started last January, although clearly a longing for what once was, and most likely won’t be again – or maybe, something infrequent.
Like many of her poems, this one appears to be an effort to explain her situation to someone for whom she has sincere affection, and from whom she hopes to gain acceptance again.
Whether this is the same person she wrote previous poems to, it’s hard to say, although she is clearly trying to sway him.
(In my self-deception, I wanted to believe this is a response to a song I posted, but it is not).
But the poem does reflect her current mindset, a kind of forlorn wish that things were different than they turned out.
Things have calmed, she says, the “Those of wanting” this thing have some how leveled out, moving onto a mothering undefinable plain.
And yet it always there, “the floaty space between head and heart,” while other things “traverse the realer plains of existence.”
She is basically saying, that while her desire for him has calmed to some degree, she still wants him, as she tries to balance what her brain tells her, against what her heart aches for.
She still lusts for him, breathing deeply, feeling him all around her, seeing him when she closed her eyes, hearing his voice when she falls to sleep.
He courses through the veins of her existence, even though he is rarely with her physically.
It might be a wrong assumption to think this poem continues the theme of her previous love poems, still longing for the man with whom she had an affair earlier this year.
(I might be wrong in this assumption, and it is possible she has simply found another man to lust after. But the feeling the poem evokes suggests a longer-term relationship than some new affair.)
She is clearly struggles with her lust and her desire to be with him against some other factors not made clear in the poem, perhaps his marriage or engagement getting once more in the way of her happiness, his inability to spend time with her because of that fact.
The last few lines of the poem make it clear just how intensely she feels, and that something is keeping them apart. The poem might be a siren’s song, calling him back from the ether, hoping to fix this disparity of Floaty space between her head and heart.
She is alone, full of anguish, reaching out to him in the poem to express how much she still feels for him, a long-distance manipulation perhaps to bring him back into her arms and bed.
He consumes her ever waking thought, and perhaps her dreams as well.
He may be deliberately keeping his distance from her, making her agony worse.
In some ways, this is really two poems, the first of which gives a progress report on her current situation, while the second is a love poem that expresses how much she adores him.
The first part of the poem strongly resembles the themes of several previous poems, a Romeo & Juillet like situation in which some larger force may be keeping them apart, perhaps she has fallen for something in an opposition political camp – which could explain all those contacts she has with so many political people who are in opposition to the Virgin Mayor.
My best guess, however, is that this is a personal poem, not a political one, and whatever keeps them apart has little or nothing to do with politics.
As pointed out previously, she is telling her lover that things have calmed down for her – her ambitions have leveled out into something unknown.
In other words, she thought she knew what she wanted, now she’s not so sure, but the agony of desire has grown less intense, even though she still longs for him.
Although desire is still there, there is a gap between logic and love, and she floats in that limbo uncertain about what to do next, if she can do anything at all.
Common sense tells her to move on; her heart tells her she can’t. So, she floats in between these two unattainable options.
It is clear that her ambitions have been put into check by circumstances, yet not extinguished. She still loves him and wants him, and wishes he were physically with her, when in every other imagined way, he’s in her heart and head all the time.
The repeated word “plane” is significant in that she defines her ambition as leveling out into a plane of its own. It’s always there floating between her heart and her head, while herd and heard deal with the real planes of existence.
These planes are the every day stuff, the stuff of survival, how to push ahead, and to somehow wake up each morning without fear.
As a progress report, the poem seems to want to reassure the reader (whomever she is writing it for) that she still feels affection towards him.
Linking this with previous poems in which she sees no right or wrong, fair or unfair, she has come to accept the reality of survival, although this poem shows she still aches for love.
She must do what she must do, trickling up to survive, surrendering herself to fate – as one of the previous poems suggests, fallen while at the same time finding beauty perhaps even forgiveness, none the less still waking up afraid and is forced to calm herself.
Her ambition – whether for success or for success in love – has been tempered by reality. She does not know what comes next.
I can almost hear the other side of this poetic conversation (which goes back to a previous poem) in which he says life is complicated, while she maintains it’s simple – she and he are alone and that’s all there is.
It is easy to imagine him in pain, asking what she intends to do, and why can’t he see her. He seems to be reasonably intelligent, and into the arts well enough for him to comprehend what she is saying poetically.
In some ways, she may well be the one responsible for keeping him distant, telling him how much she loves him, but needs space (floating between heart and brain) for her to sort her life out.
Of course, it is possible that she has someone on the hook and the poem is designed to keep him calm, while she figures out what to do next.
Is she simply leading him on, telling him she loves him, and yet at the same time, keeps him at arm’s length, saying she needs to get her head straight, while she is looking for someone else that she can trickle up with.
If this last is true, then this poem takes on a whole different perspective, a kind of game in which she keeps him on the hook while looking to hook someone else.
Who can say for sure?
It is always the eyes, as attractive as a Venus flytrap, and twice as deadly, either in the photographs she sends me or in her stare across the table at the office, large eyes, full of secrets I can't read-- others might find her mouth more attractive, but a bit too wind like the femme fatal from a James Bond movie, very kissable, but not quite as dangerous, too predicable in that it will laugh or crys, smile or pout, yet always too obvious like a barometer of mood, while her eyes, her mysterious eyes, hold all that she is all about, a lock box which needs the right combination to open and a defiant stare that challenges you to try and open her up, dares you to find out who she really is.
As pointed out in a previous journal, I did not pay close attention to her poetry early on. Otherwise, I might have been more careful, and might have had a better understanding of what she is about, and her agenda.
And if I am reading one of her early poems from late April 2012 correctly, she appears to have been warning me (and other people) about who she really is and what she is really after.
She paints herself as a hummingbird (something of a musical connotation), who lands to get nourishment, then quickly moves on “Fast, long and hard” taking refuge with someone else.
This landing, feeding and taking off again has become her reality.
Nothing is permanent, or for that matter meant to be mean.
This is simply who she is and what she does, and how she survives.
She “flits” in and out of other people’s vision, and for a time, some are mesmerized by her, searching for some deeper meaning before she moves on from them.
While those whose lives she touches want to know why, there is no real answer except that this is simply her nature, no other reason, it is what she is and what she must do.
This poem may or may not have been aimed at me. It comes at a time when I raised those kinds of questions after she said certain things to me, and at a time when she clearly was making her move to leave me and attend to our temporary boss. And, of course, raised the question how she could leap from one flower to another so frivolously.
While not as blatant a statement as she made in the trickle and fair/unfair poems, the message – in hindsight – is clear.
One cannot question what she does because it is not a matter of reason or logic it is simply fundamental to who and what she is there is no deeper meaning and had I been wiser when I first saw the poem much of what transpired a short time after she posted it might have been avoided
perhaps she suspected I already knew she was moving on to our temporary boss and needed to make it clear this was not a criticism of me so much as her need for substance I could not provide for her.
The use of Hummingbird as a metaphor sums up much since it is a tiny often defenseless creature who relies on its cunning quickness and its invisibility to survive.
In later poems she would call herself an accidental thief and continue this theme of temporary relationships that other people take more seriously than she does but this poem sets up the foundation of the rest pointing out this behavior is not intentional so much as instinctual and she asks her critics what else can she do since this is in her nature.
One poem posted last September summed up her life as to how many times she fell in love. This poem suggests love is not her goal and it is impossible to pin her down since nature requires her to behave this way, getting what she needs from this person before moving on to the next.
This is her life to visit than to leave to taste the honey of this or that temporary relationship then on to the next always on the move always looking for the next person or situation knowing perhaps that no one will satisfy all her needs and she seems determined not to let tied down to anyone, calling those who want to possess her misguided.
The poem is constructed in two stanzas, the first describing the habits of the hummingbird, the second ascribing those characteristics to herself in her relationship to fellow human beings.
She makes it clear that this is what she does and what she will likely always do, a friendly warning not to take disappointment personally, or to try to find deep meaning in any of it. One does not question a sunflower or a bumble bee. These things exist, they have their own qualities and habits, what allows them to thrive. There is no great lesson of life to be learned, although it might be pleasant in the short term to be the flower she leans on and enjoy that temporary union while it lasts.
What makes me suspicious about her activity during and after her time working in our office are all the connections she made, who I would never have suspected, and which ties her to some of the most unscrupulous political operatives in the county – people who were political opponents of the Virgin Mayor and RR.
This included a detective in the opposing Mayor (and state Senator) town, his public relations man, and the deputy chief of the fire department of that town, and a retired police captain and the retired deputy police chief as well.
The PR guy from that town was notorious for his dirty politics and use of black mail behind the scenes, as well as his ties to the Private Detective seeking to bring down the Neighboring Mayor, one of the Virgin Mayor’s chief allies.
She clearly made connections as the PR person for the Virgin Mayor, including some top editors in some of the daily newspapers in the area.
Why is she so connected to some of the Virgin Mayor’s most notorious enemies?
Early on, back when this all started, I suspected she might be operating on behalf of some of these people, especially the State Senator’s PR guy, whose tactics have always scared me. But I dismissed these suspicions because I didn’t think she would serve as anybody’s tool, especially if these people like that PR guy wanted only to bring down the Virgin Mayor.
Seeing her connections recently, I am again puzzled as to whether she was being used by these people while at our office, and if secretly she worked against the interests of the Virgin Mayor, who kindly gave her employment when she needed to land somewhere, and for whom she spied on his political enemies.
The question remains why she has so many close associations with people who want largely to take away her job by bringing down the Virgin Mayor.
The Mayor’s chief enemy and the man who filed the charges against him for hacking claims a plot has been hatched to associate him with prostitutes, in order to blackmail him into dropping the charges.
While RR and others might resort to such tactics, the State Senator’s PR man is rumored to have engaged in similar tactics during his long career.
Until I saw this list of the State Senator’s associates with ties to her, I thought her strings were being pulled by RR, even when she went after the Neighboring Mayor. Now I’m not so sure – although if she is working for the state senator’s PR guy and his Private Detective, she certainly would have used her charms to lure the Virgin Mayor into a compromising position – which she has not done.
In fact, the Virgin Mayor is doing his best to save her job by getting her civil service protection in case he loses the case and is forced to resign.
While she has tried to bring down the Neighboring Mayor – using the private detective to dig up dirt – I had assumed she was doing so under orders from our boss, who has her own ties to the private detective.
But now, seeing who is actually connected to her from the opposition camp, I once again wonder if this whole disaster over the last year was orchestrated, and she did the bidding of other powerful forces.
But if this is the case, you would think she would have gotten something out of it from that camp, a job or position with the state senator, and trickled up from her role with the Virgin Mayor.
I know she has a big raise pending thanks to the Virgin Mayor, so she may well be sticking to him because of that, and because RR has once again hitched his wagon to the Virgin Mayor as well.
We shall see what becomes of her connection to these strange bedfellows.
