Opening it all up September 2013

 

 

In revealing so much about herself, she clearly shows she has been long suffering, although I’m still not quite sure of her ultimate objective, perhaps to win sympathy from the man she loves, and bring him back to that still warm spot in the bed beside her.

“I was working a mean four cups of coffee, three diet coke habit, instead of eating, sleeping, feeling, taking a breath (insert health activity here,) she wrote. “I was still paying off a five-year-long bankruptcy from a previous marriage, making my credit – well, nonexistent.”

The concept of a “previous marriage” knocked me out of my chair, and made me wonder had she actually “brought the farm” more than the once she claimed in that poem a year ago, or is she talking about the musician she married – where she got stuck with his bad debt?

This may well be tied to a Facebook post earlier this week when she said, “I love my husband,” and is somehow associated with a woman she had been going out to play and dinner with, hinting I suppose that she has gone back to that side of the aisle she experienced while on her trip to Europe and her association with the restaurant owner in upstate New York prior to that.

The use of the word “previous” suggests that there was more than one marriage, one in the past and something more contemporary, though in all our conversations and all her poems, there was no hint of a second marriage, and I have to wonder if the husband I know she had (and with whom she is still reasonably close) sat up and took notice of this.

I’m assuming he is the one and only and the by previous, she meant him.

The other alarming bit involved the bankruptcy, which came about when an insurance company filed a lawsuit against her because her former friend burned down the bathroom of a home in a house she rented, a friend to whom she had left the house until the lease ran out and until he could acquire a lease of his own.

This came at a point when she fled that part of the country after having exhausted several careers, her music career with her husband, her time at the restaurant, and later some kind of dancing school and still another at a horse school of some sort.

Her lot did not improve with her move back to the New York City area.

“I was overworked and very underpaid,” she said about the situation she ended up in, a nearly constant refrain from her early days at our office, too.

She told our office gossip that she resigned because of sparce pay, although in truth, the Little Man forced her out.

She claimed she got much more money at her current gig, although it did not start out that way, and may still not be true even though the Virgin Mayor or Joey D gave her a $20,000 increase in pay last May.

The fact that she is putting all this down in print strikes me as desperate, partly because it serves as a road map of her life – as if she’s finally crawled out of her shell and is letting people see who she is, what she’s done, and the overall pattern of how she lives.

This is not something I would have expected a year ago, or even six months ago, but it has the feel of someone who is looking to lay everything on the table, most likely trying to impress the man she loves.

Her life with the man who eventually became her stalker was no nirvana.

“I was so depressed and unmotivated from lack of nutrition, I could hardly get out of bed,” she wrote. “I felt unsafe, borderline suicidal and complete disenchanted with myself, my life and the future I oft times ashamedly wished would not come.”

At this point, she started to get negative pap smears, which came to a head earlier this year, when she found, she would have to undergo serious surgery that would remove a significant part of her female anatomy.

It was never clear as to whether she actually wanted to have kids. But the treatment took that option out of her life, and for all her openness, I can’t tell just how she feels about that.

 

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Poetry Journal Aug. 20, 2013

 

Do we even know what love is or when lust a man feel I somehow magically transformed into something more, she waiting for the body of a man to refill that space in the bed beside her, as if that somehow signifies love and make sup for those long, lonely hours when he’s not there, and does it take being there to be love, or can someone love someone from afar, falling over the trip wire of words, evolving the same sense of passion love making might bring, needing nothing more than to read what she says goes on inside her head.

Does love need to take the same predictable steps or can there be that path less traveled, leading to a place less known, getting dee into the heart by way of brain rather than brawn?

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Still angry Sept.2, 2013

 

  

As much as I wish otherwise, I suspect she still eyes me as her enemy – even though there is nothing in her recent poetry posts that make reference to me in any way.

I suspect she thinks I’m the one who frustrated her ambitions at our office, even though she used the threat of stalking to disable me – which apparently failed when I went to management and laid out the whole sordid mess, including the role our former temporary boss played.

I still cringe when he called me at the axillary office after that whole mess in the park to tell me he would testify against me if questioned about what went on.

He is hardly as clever as he believes, but was somewhat justified in coming after me when I clearly threw him under the bus when I alerted her about he and I discussing her.

You can’t pull the curtain back and not expect the wizard to get upset when the mechanics of his magic are exposed.

He got scared; and then got mean.

While all that was more than a year ago, I am wary of his claim of friendship since he’s been laying booby traps to see if I’m the source feeding the Hometown blogger dirt about what goes on in our office, when I actually believe the person responsible is the boss herself.

While coincidences occur, I suspect my posts – severely restricted by my internet nanny – may inspire continued outage at me. This is particularly true of the batch of photos of the waterfront I posted, including some places where she apparently frequented, prompting one or more strange phone calls from some guy, looking to speak to my wife – perhaps a warning for me to back off.

The fact that I did a story about the financial scandal involving the park where she practices yoga does not seem to matter. She’ll think what she thinks regardless of how justified in doing what I’m doing.

Then, out of the blue, our former temporary boss gives me a call – perhaps again reacting to something the hometown blogger posted alluding to him.

Another reason I believe she is still enraged at me comes out of the Small Man’s reaction to the press conference she put on in regard to the death of the infant.

The small man told the Virgin Mayor to keep her away from him, still holding a grudge against her attempt to bring down the Congressman with whom the small man is closely aligned.

It is not difficult for me to think she believes I’m the one who finked on her with the Small Man last year, when, in fact, it was someone else.

I’ve also noted a number of hits on my blog from a town in Pennsylvania where her childhood friend resides, leaving open the question as to whether she is clicking onto my site from that location or he’s doing it on her behalf to see just what it is I’m up to.

Although most of her posts come off as a positive affirmation of her salvation from cancer, they are not happy poems and essays, but reek of desperation, not over me, but over love lost, a manic over reaction to what may be seen as a miracle and may also pave the way for a new career. She is selling herself as a new and improved version of whom she was with the promise of becoming somebody entirely new, when in actuality, she appears to be abandoning one shell to take up occupancy in another, leaving all of us to wonder who she really is – with doubts we may never know.

As pointed out, most of these seem directed at a particular person, looking apparently for sympathy and forgiveness, emphasizing her long suffering and how much she has changed from the person he or she (most likely a he) knew back then, and encouraging him to come back and see the truth for himself.

There is something acutely sad in all this, as if our roles in the world have reversed, and she is the one pinning away for love that has eluded her, in much the way those who make up her army of stalkers had in regard to her.

I might take comfort in the idea that she finally knows how it feels, but I don’t. I feel sorry for her. Pain is pain, and there is no satisfaction from seeing her suffer, regardless of how much she hates me.

This reminds me of a poem she posted early in 2012 when she said, “This is not going to stop.”

 

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poetry journal may 2012

 I get vertigo just look at her face, poised at the edge with a four-story drop behind her, a photo she sent in the dead of night as if to explain the pain I caused her, and I ache to hold her back, but I can’t.

She will mistake a pull for a push and make me out to be the one who wants to see her fall, when all I want is to keep her safe, taking blame for getting her there, a fool doing foolish things the consequences of which I am unaware until far too late, scared that if I could grab her shoulder to pull her back we might both tumble into the abyss, that deep darkness that waiting behind her for her to lose her grip

I get vertigo just look at her face, poised at the edge with a four-story drop behind her, a photo she sent in the dead of night as if to explain the pain I caused her, and I ache to hold her back, but I can’t.

She will mistake a pull for a push and make me out to be the one who wants to see her fall, when all I want is to keep her safe, taking blame for getting her there, a fool doing foolish things the consequences of which I am unaware until far too late, scared that if I could grab her shoulder to pull her back we might both tumble into the abyss, that deep darkness that waiting behind her for her to lose her grip

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Poetry Journal May 2012

I don’t understand!

I don’t understand!

I DON’T UNDERSTAND!

This intensity of pain, nails scraped across the chalk board of her soul, a sound once inside my head, I can’t get out, a buzz saw ripping at my brain.

What did I do to inspire such pain.

I am not that important to her and yet I get this roar of it in my head, a screech so utterly raw my nerves ache just remembering it.

I don’t understand!

Did I rip off the scab of some old wound or have I created a new wound in her, that voice in my ears, as I staggered up that hill.

I don’t understand!

I don’t understand!

Maybe I never will.

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poetry journal May 2012

 

PAIN!

It ripples through me over the phone as I make my way up the hill, the screech of a bird so wounded she can’t even articulate rage, at least not yet, it will come later with the idea of hate

PAIN!

“Why did you abandon me?” she screeches, and I am stunned, her words as effect as a boxer’s body slow, each knocking the wind out of me so I can barely respond, each of my words coming out in small syllables: “I – don’t. I – thought, I – am – so sorry.

None adequate to heal the sound she emits, as if I have torn her heart out and at that moment, wishing had torn my own heart out instead.

PAIN!

“Why did you leave me?” she screeches and I can’t say why.

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poetry journal May 2012

 

It is not exactly the scent of a woman that makes me ache, though that, too.

She in her place, exuding a smell that most men would kill for, mingled with the odor of the bar world she fits into so well, and the heavy cologne of the bartender, and the bad breath of the man of the couple on my right side, his woman with cheap Jean Nate, less morbidly sweet than Chantily yet just as tasteless, but appropriate here as if pieces of a puzzle that when put together make up her world, as she grins and sips her wine and flirts with the bartender, leaning across the bar to show him her business card as he stares down the front of her dress, caught up with her scent, too, an irresistible aroma we men breathe in deeply, while lesser women like Jean Nate we try to ignore, her scent some scent I’ve smelled before just can’t remember where.

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Poetry journal may 2012

 Maybe I need to be the center of attention.

She certainly is, at least with the bartender and the older men with Jean Nate, me in the middle, talked over and around when I thin “But this is supposed to be about my birthday,” and all I want for a present is for her, big, amazing eyes to turn in my direction, the need to feel important to her again, when I know I’m not.

This silly child inside me, needy as a new born and perhaps just as pathetic, needing someone to change my diaper or pat me on the back until I burp, scared and lonely, even in her company, and so, I decide to go home, and leave, she, I think, able to get any man in that bar to keep her company.

She does not need me.

 

Maybe I need to be the center of attention.

She certainly is, at least with the bartender and the older men with Jean Nate, me in the middle, talked over and around when I thin “But this is supposed to be about my birthday,” and all I want for a present is for her, big, amazing eyes to turn in my direction, the need to feel important to her again, when I know I’m not.

This silly child inside me, needy as a new born and perhaps just as pathetic, needing someone to change my diaper or pat me on the back until I burp, scared and lonely, even in her company, and so, I decide to go home, and leave, she, I think, able to get any man in that bar to keep her company.

She does not need me.

 

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

I am sooooooooo selfish!

A love struck cupid with a self inflicted wound, the mis-aimed arrow with no Venus to blame, she, psyche, giving me this birthday gift, granting me this moment with her and it is not enough.

And I sit on this stool, streaming in my own froth, she glowing beside me in the dim bar light, not yet ingesting ambrosia Jupiter offers as recompense, her life as merely mortal, free of anguish, only jealous golds like Venus can inflict, and here, I am a jealous Cupid denying her the attention she deserves, so completely foolish as to believe I can even remotely satisfy her needs.

How to you (me) bring joy to someone who needs more than any mortal can give?

How do I even dare to think I can?

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Poetry Journal Sept. 2, 2013

 

She puts on a good face if what she claims is true – not that she ever thought of becoming a mother.

No, it may not be possible and whatever road she takes one wont’ be one to a white house with picket fence and the traditional 2 and a half kids, playing on the swings in the back yard.

Not that she ever wanted anything like that, when there are so many other possibilities, needing no warm womb to give birth in, only her limited imagination.

“Who has to change diapers five times daily?” I almost hear her say, “or wake up at 2 a.m. to comfort a wailing babe, let alone breast feeding in public?” (she gets enough stares from enough men already without that.)

And yet, somewhere deeper inside herself, that primal past of her, mourns at the loss, this aspect of human existence we are bred to achieve, to propagate and continue the race, more than enough challenge for people struggling each day to survive.

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Too much to bear Sept. 2, 2013

  

After more than a year out in the cold, I should not be complaining about her releasing too much information about her private life.

And yet, again, she throws it all out there for anybody to look at and I’m enough of a voyeur to take a peek.

“Two years ago, after countless bad paps, two colposcopes, one leep procedure, a cone biopsy and many excruciating months of learning how to wait, here I am, a new life on lease.”

But she said the lifesaving care required them to gut her female parts – at least, that’s what I read for her post, and how she discovered this other cure which she claims she will fully explain in her new nature blog.

“This is my goal – to share my bumbling, scary, exciting, wonderful, funny and human journey towards self-healing, self-acceptance and rediscovery of the will to truly, truly life the light I know is out there and in there and all around us,” she writes. “As long as we can take the initial leap of faith, there are in fact pretty magical and simple ways to fix what we thought could never, ever be fixed. It’s kind of like Narnia, but it’s real, right at your fingertips, or more accurately at your nearest organic grocer.”

Underlying all of this positive stuff are some fundamental questions, especially because she insists on going public with it.

My theories have varied. At one point, I suspected this might be an effort to disguise (somehow) the fact that our former temporary boss contacted the cancer from her – since it is seen as a communicable disease, while at another time, I thought perhaps her going public was a message to her former lover, showing how she has cured herself and that he no longer needs to be concerned about catching something from her.

Perhaps, the message is even broader than that, sent out to the general public to quell the nerves of others who might fear they contracted it as well.

All of these things could be true, although a more fundamental question maybe, how she contracted the ailment in the first place. Who gave it to her, if this is as contagious as implied.

While she speaks about the last few years, the disease might have lain dormant for years, even decades, emerging at an inconvenient time (if there is any such thing as a convenient time for cancer.)

On the surface, all these posts seem positive, and yet (as some of her poems indicate) the hyperventilation of her writing suggests panic and desperation, as if she’s as much trying to convince herself as to convince other people.

Yet, it seems clear that she is carrying a heavy burden, not just physically, but emotionally as well, and needs someone – or someone in particular – to help her carry it.

 

 

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poetry journal May 2012

 “Where are you,” she texts.

When I tell her, she asks: “Are you coming or not?”

I say, “Where?” and she says, “You know where,” meaning the new restaurant she is supposed to cover and I say, “I thought you didn’t want me to come,” and after a delay, she texts, “Are you coming or not?”

I text: “Do you really want me there,” to which I get no response.

I am almost home, tired, depressed and feeling every bit as lonely as I ever had, and so, I park my car and go into the house, finally get a text saying: “Where are you?” again.

To which I reply and again she asks, “Are you coming or not?” and I respond, “Do you really want me,” and again I get no response, and like a dog in heat, I go back out, down to where I know she is, and she asks when she sees me, “What are you doing here?”

“You texted me,” I say. She says, “I was texting my brother.”

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 I feel the cold kiss of the glass lip as I sip at the bar, a bitter brew I knew coming I would taste, yet still came, this warm night in May more than a week after my birthday, the chill tip of the glass like a bitter kiss, the feel of good bye, the remote look in her eye as she sits on the stool beside mine, her attention turning in every direction except the one I'm in, her lips moist with the taste of a vintage I ache to taste, but has become a rare year I suspect I may never taste again, regardless of how much I hunger for it, the taste of my drink like that brew Christ drank in that painful garden long, long ago, HE as I knowing the pain of what must come next, the chill of the lips lost forever.

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Poetry journal May 2012

 Two days after I recall it all, embroided in my brain like a bad tattoo, never to get removed, had I wanted to, where she/we/they sat and the crispness of the bar, the bartender, and the couple from God knows where seated side by side with us, the same place we came once before, later, darker, inside rather than out, not Paris, although she wore blue, maybe the couple from Eastern Europe, we, from just up the block, the eerie sense of Deja Vu as if I should have know what would come to pass, how I acted already drunk, like a giddy bride, a birthday boy, a bumbling idiot with card and candy she thought I was crazy to bring since this was my belated birthday bash not hers, destined to become a disappointment, all of the gin joints etc, and yet, I felt like Rick

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 She makes me feel like a lost dog she gives a bowl of water to when she agrees to meet me at the bar after all, and I'm just needy enough to lap up the gift even knowing it is more out of pity than affection.

There are not the kinds of things a person should be grateful for, when it is never really real, just a show in which I happen to be the beneficiary, though in truth, who can say what she gets out of it, this chess player many moves ahead in a game I am destined to lose, check mater long before i move my first pawn, king trapped in the reflections of her amazing eyes, where the real mysteries lie, her features disguising who she really is and I can only guess as to what end the game is, whether she just plays to keep in practice.

Past and future tense Aug. 31, 2013

 

I keep coming back to those handful of poems she wrote during or just after college, partly because they are untainted by anything I did, and represent perhaps the purest sense of what she was thinking and feeling back in 2001 to 2003.

More importantly, her use of diction creates layers of meaning, some of which I get, much of which escapes me, but I’m always returning to in an effort to make sense of these – absent any other information source that more of her contemporary poems provide.

What also makes this poems special – including those she published in the college magazine at the time – is how advanced she was at such an early age, something she clearly understood when she set out to impress the masters of poetry like Koch and others, and by default impresses me.

While all of the poems show her ability to handle language, I keep going back to the one she wrote about the past and future, partly because in it may well be clues to what some of her other poems, such as change of priorities poem may actually mean.

Her use of diction adds to but may not always define what the poem means – a kind of seasoning she inserts, even a bit of a tease, especially when she vaguely alludes to some potential romantic involvement.

I have speculated on the meaning of her future and past poem previously, but only marginally on her use of words and phrases to enhance the mood and meaning of the subtest, even though I don’t think the intention of her diction is completely define the meaning of the poem.

She sets the tone of the poem when she opens with her feeling the train, which comes out a sky which she might not expect rain to come. This suggest she may mean something other than merely the weather, perhaps a comment on the fairness and unfairness of life (into every life rain must fall) and this might be reflected in the image that follows about a feast commencing, an almost Dionysos affair, or perhaps more suited to Silenus, his father, god of wine-making and drunkenness, an affair of “lime twists and tangos,” something of a reflection of social status, similar to references she made in her other poem on changing priorities where some people are part of the in crown and others are not. (this in group out group theme runs through a number of her poems, even more contemporary ones.)

The next image continues to build on the concept of a drunken revery and privilege when she refers to the lurches and the perhaps drunken vision when she talks about the angles of a time never spent though nostalgic over. This may well refer to barroom talk in which people boast about things they’ve never done or live in the fantasy world of an exaggerated past – as Springsteen talked about in his song, Glory Days.

“It secures the angles of time never spent, coinciding with the nostalgia that comes with it,” she writes.

Nostalgia for something that may not exist. While I can’t be certain of my interpretation, this series of metaphors seems to suggest again that life is unfair and that people who get their piece of the pie don’t necessarily deserve it, even though they delude themselves with the idea they do.

While she is not likely talking literal drunkenness, but perhaps drunk on power and privilege, she continues when she refers to it as a skewed vision.

The next stanza seems to imply that she is guided by this flawed vision, perhaps this mistaken notion of what success means, and this seems also to fit into her poem on change of priorities, as if she has been lulled into a false sense of accomplishment (perhaps foreshadowing a poem she posted earlier this year about lack of fairness in a world where there is no such thing as right and wrong, good and bad, theme persistent throughout her poetic life, at least, dating back to her days at college.

“Sometimes with a skewed view to guide me, quiets me and the experience is enough to make the scheme anew,” she writes.

This implies that she takes comfort even if the view is distorted, and as later passages suggest, this illusion allows her to reinvent old schemes as if new.

The word “scheme” has heavy negative overtones, although she may have used it for the music in association with the word “skewed.”

Yet even this is negative and paints an ugly picture of manipulation, self-delusion, and a sense of a scam – as if she has already developed the trickle up philosophy she later lays claim to more explicitly, and there is a certain amount of self judgement implied, if not guilt, then an understand she is in a survival mode, needing a certain level of ruthlessness to accomplish her goals.

Then, she uses an odd phrase in connection to refreshing her schemes, “turn twice” theme she has harbored for a long time and may refer to a once popular opinion on art, what makes it come alive and how to separate the artistic from the biological.

How do you reinvent yourself or your art so that old schemes seem fresh again and perhaps serves as argument against the concept of “It’s been done before,” although she uses the term “It happens all the time.”

Although the poem concludes on a less than popular note, returning to the opening in which she wants to be invited to the dance, yet all she has done has been a jig, wasting time, giving the neighborhood cat something to play with rather than perhaps actually achieving what she hoped for.

 

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

She says she can't make it for my birthday dinner, and I feel crushed, as if I suddenly learned there is no such thing as Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, or even the Easter bunny, and my day passes like I knew it would if my life had never encountered her, me, the tiny tot aching at age sever for a bicycle I never got, just some clothing for my birthday I won't wear until the fall, we all living this illusion of what we want vs what we get, expecting something that can't be real no matter how often we clink our heels and wish for home, she being the terrible twisted that shook my world and deposited me in the midst of munchkins, dressing me up in ruby slippers for a stroll down a yellow brick road to the even greater illusion of Oz, we love with this in our heads always.

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 She asks what my plans are for my birthday, a surprise call after days she when she hasn't  -- and when I tell her I don't have any, she tells me that's not right, and suggests she and I ought to go get dinner together and my hear leaps into my throat so I croak: "Yes," and then ask "When" thinking of those other times when she sheared meals in local pubs, especially the time after the ride on the cruise up and down the harbor, and I think maybe we can rekindle what was lost, stirring life up in colas I though doomed to die, and yet, she sounds so distant I think she really doesn't mean it, surprised again when she suggests Monday after work and I jump at it, just like an overly eager dog after an already worn out bone, thinking something is better than nothing for my birthday.

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

the last thing I want is for her to feel sorry for me ; yet it is exactly what I want, the odd duality of a supposedly mature man, if any man can actually be mature.

We are all children really, lusting after our mother -- as Freud says -- plotting the deaths of our fathers, poking out our own eyes when we wake up and realize how childish we have been, this intense sense of jealousy over something we claim we don't really want, aching down deep in the bones for something we know we should not have, and falling into a tantrum when we see the treat we want in someone else's hands, this duality that has nothing to do with right or wrong, a fine kind of madness to which pain is the only cure -- and time.

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