Cat and mouse September 26, 2013

  

Google tracking came up with an anniversary present this morning when the Jersey Journal gave our poet/photographer photo credit for a picture she took Monday in the town where she works.

Our office also published her photo, but never gave her credit – at least, not online.

This says something about management and its inability to appreciate talent, especially someone who has moved on.

It has been a year since we last had direct communication. But we have played tag over the internet during that time (a clever and illusive frat boy who needs a drink?)

I suspect we both have taken up software to at least partly disguise our activities, and to some degree this makes much more obvious the intensity of the situation – the way the threat of nuclear destruction made life more intense back in the good old days of the Cold War.

I can’t be certain how often she checks in on my website – though sometimes, when I can sneak something passed my cyber nanny I try to post something provocative (although I’m not as gifted a writer in this regard as she is). I suspect those times when I am aware of her visitations, this is intentional on her regard, sending a message that I’m still on her radar for good or bad. But she does not come out into the open often; neither do I.

After a year, nothing seems to have changed dramatically between us except perhaps we have inched a bit closer to the edge.

This concept of mutual outrage cannot go on forever. We both need to rediscover the path our lives must take, to make the best of the situation.

I still haven’t returned our former temporary boss’ call from Saturday, presuming he was following up on the coverage I did about the Virgin Mayor’s trial, or perhaps concerning GA (the hometown blogger) blog and what she’s been posting.

I haven’t a clue as to what our poet is thinking, except for the sent that her outrage has not diminished (this is a gross presumption since I have no evidence good or bad), and that we are still far from a peace treaty.

Her poems are about someone else, and if there is a hidden message for me in any of them, I can’t find them.

Her focus seems to be on reinventing herself, though I get the sense that even this has expired somewhat, and I wait for the next incarnation. What shell will she display after she has abandoned the one she currently resides in?

Is she still pursuing a career in Public Relations? If so, the photo credit may be another small step in that direction.

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Poetry Journal Jan. 12, 2024

 

Jan.12, 2024

 I missed it the moment it went missing like an old ache I mistake as missing until it is gone, and I ach to have it back, the face I see still in the half remembered dreams I know I’ve dreamt yet can’t get back in focus once I am awake – that face she posted then removed and replaced only not quite the same face, resurrected, more doubtful, even in the depths of her eyes that still drawn me to look into for too long, maybe with a tinge of the old fear she felt way back when I doubted myself, this face, these eyes, those precious lips, stirring up the broth with a slow simmer to an intense boil – again.

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Poetry Journal Feb. 13, 2024

 

 

 

Feb. 13, 2024

 

Nothing every last forever, entropy eroding the roots of what we believe will survive, sworn statements that we think will endure when even what we build with steel won’t survive rust eating at the foundations we put down in the assumption of strength, nothing is as strong as we assume or as dependable as we hope for, especially love, which like plastic begins to crack as soon as we create it, the near-invisible fractures  we do not notice until they begin to break, by which time it is too late to save it.

Nothing survives this world and we must accept this or drive ourselves crazy assuming we can, when we can’t save anything especially love.

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

May 2012

 

I get a rush like a drug rush when I get her email saying she needs my help because the mayor she covers just got busted, email, then text and not just from her, but from our former temporary boss, all of which I miss because I’m still on the road when it happens. I see only the notice on my phone as I drive and my heart beats faster as I press the accelerator to get to my office where I can respond, caught up for the first time in that cub routine, as if I actually believe she needs me when she doesn’t. She’s too good at what she does, and I know it, and yet, it is as if we have changed roles, I need her, I am the cub reporter, a feeling I also know can’t last.

 

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Poetry journal May 2012

 

May 2012

 It isn’t that I waited for this moment to come, I dreaded it, wondering what it would feel like meeting her again after the scream and the panic and the photo she sent from the roof of the place where she lives, this being the Tuesday after the Tuesday after the Tuesday I left her at the bar, her absence in the middle Tuesday leaving me here as if in the midst of a wake, and she struts in as if unaffected, except from the stairs where she stops to stare down at me, her dark gaze penetrating any defense I might have maintain, and what was once a mere chill, is frigid, a new ice age, no small amount of heat will ever thaw, that stare so brief and yet so revealing as she marches on to her place upstairs, while I cringe in the cupboard beneath the stairs, abandoned.

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Poetry Journal Sept. 22, 2013

 

Sept. 22, 2013

 

Her fingers drip with it, even in her imagination, gripping too hard until it burst in her hands, not sweet so much as bitter sweet, like all love is, and still she doesn’t let go, holing onto it, feeling it throb, each beat of it to the bear of her heart, and her rapid breathing, the groan she hears she emits as she keep hold, not one bit of this real, save in the memory of what once was, that perfect moment she says she could have died for, and perhaps a part of her did, part of her that went with him, part of her like him, never came back, leaving her with the sticky revery of remembrance and the wish for it all to happen again, clinging moist fingers on something too slick to grip, a memory of love, of a man she still loves, dripping through her fingers, and he may be dripping, too.

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Bitter and sweet Sept. 22, 2013

 

 

I was wrong about her silence, at least in part. This comes as a result of my not frequently checking her poetry page (which I assumed I was and makes me think the rare Thursday poem was posted at some other point, pre dated, the way I sometimes do for my news archive.)

The date matters because if it was posted Thursday, then it came after her appearing at court, but just prior to my publishing my column for the week and the front page stories on the Virgin Mayor in what was (and may still be) her paper.

Even then, it is likely she would have seen breaking news coverage regardless of when she posted the poem.

Thursday translates to my last post on my blog as well, and my return to my old website over which I have much more knowledge of who comes and goes, although I notice that those who come to my site via Facebook do not leave a trace except for a Facebook entry, a handy thing to know.

After not having heard from him for a couple of weeks, I got a call on Saturday from our former temporary boss, making me wonder if she reached out to him again – after all, she did refer to him recently as her “hero.”

But I suspect her most recent poem, another love poem, is not aimed at him.

As in some of her former feature stories, her title appears to be a double entendre with distinct sexual overtones, another possible plea to her former lover with whom she has not had physical contact with at the moment.

The poem appears to be homage to the plum poem by William Carlos Williams and has a similar tone. (I did my own version of this a number of years ago, although lacked the sexual subtext of hers).

The poem plays into her juicing, although it seems to be a metaphor for love making (or at least, one she is imagining,) and plays into her desire to wake up with a man in her bed after being together with him the whole night.

She paints a picture of her man rising from sleep “mussed and groggy” while she, “a hopeless early rise” sits by the bedside waiting for him to come awake, smoothing down his ruffled hair with her still sticky fingers (from oranges or perhaps the remnants of the previous night’s affair), pulling him from his “dutiful, do-it-all-for-everyone else” of a slumber life into a sticky revery that is a bit bitter-sweet.

There is real seduction in this short poem, not much different from the poem she wrote last January about being with him for a moment in the sun.

The diction reminds me of the phone call I had with her during those last days on the paper when she sang the praises of RR, a real trooper defending him and his beliefs, and since she appeared in court with him this week, I wonder if perhaps he has been the subject of this whole affair – though I suspect not.

The implication of sex is obvious, whether sex with him or her self-enjoyment while waiting for him to awaken.

But there is a duality in the poem that suggests they live in two different world (whomever he is), his dictated by duty and helping others, hers focused on physical and perhaps other kinds of joy. His is a world of homebound responsibilities (marriage, mortgage and such) out of which she would like to lure him so that he might experience real joy (sexual and otherwise.)

As I said, this reminds me of the Williams’ poem which opens with a similar line about the buying of fruit only his fruit is sweet.

She bought oranges to squeeze for juice to give him when he rises from sleep, most likely meaning morning love making as she smooths down his ruffled hair with fingers already sticky, though even in her imagined morning love-making, she can’t escape the reality of his other life, which is why the fruit is “bitter sweet,” and there is a clear longing in her as she and he remain remote, and she has only her imagination to fill her physical and other needs – the need of intimacy that comes in the midst of a firestorm and immense doubt.

As with many of her other poems she’s posted since the beginning of the year, I start out reading into the poem things that are not there, and realize only later that all of these poems are connected, and the person to whom she is writing them is likely the person she first seduced when she tried to keep it as an affair of the mind, when it was clear she needed something more, something physical and still, something that she could rely on to be with her when she woke up each morning.

 

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

May 2012

 

Silence isn’t always golden, I realize, seated at my desk on the landing under the stairs, like Harry Potter, latched-in by more than muggle threats or witches spells, lacking even the hoot of an owl for company, she sweeping by me with an indignant air, though pausing just long enough to stare down through the gap as I yap with some other employee on the phone, her dark eyes as scary now as they were attractive before swallowing me whole, as if I was Johah unable to escape the jaws of my own guilt, her darkness so all incompassing I am helpless against it, as if she can cast a shroud over me and cause me to fall silent as well, though she uses her silence like a weapon to be me over the shoulder for those crimes committed and I am truly humbled.

 

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

 

May 2012

 

Maybe it is an olive leaf (branch) that looks like a file folder she hand-delivers to my desk under the stairs, something I have or don’t need, yet appreciate as if I ache for an excuse to again say I’m sorry, when I’ve said it so many times, rehashing it in my head, it no longer sounds real, we all live lives without real remorse, pained less for the pain we cause than the guilt we carry on our shoulders and in our heads, and now, looking into her deep eyes, I see not what I ached for, but a reflection of my own guilt, not imposed, she does not accuse, self-attained, I am the other unforgiven thief on that hill with Christ, the one who did not seek forgiveness fully enough to know that I might meet his father in heaven, excommunicated, almost too heavy a cross to carry, I can barely look at her and not cry.

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

May 2012

 

With the sound of her scream still reverberating in my head even two weeks after the fact, I tap out the message via the company email, not the stuff of dreams were made of during those long lonely nights in my basement so, so apparently long ago, rather the formal chilly message of one professional to another, as distance as she seemed over the weeks prior to the bar, remote even though I am sending it from by cubical beneath the stairs while she sits in the bullpen within shouting distance from me, two tin can attached by string might serve as well, though I envision her face, mouth and eyes as I transmit, innocent chatter I desperately need, if only to keep the channel of communication open, a think thread that might break with the wrong word said, her face still floating in front of me, clinging to the roof.

 

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Poetry Journal May 2012

 

May 2012

 

She is right and I am wrong. I just don’t know how to escape the rut I’m stuck in, how to stop being wrong, knowing my saying sorry will never be enough.

I still feel drunk from that night in the bar even though I left before I got more than one sip, drunk on something I breath in or dream up, or fumble over in this confusing life of fog that I exist in

While I only glimpse passed her defenses to see the fog of fear she contends with, threatened in ways I don’t intense as if I have ripped off by accident a long-time healing scab so that she gets to bleed again from an old wound I have made more painful, the cry over the cell phone that night after the bar, reverberating through me like the echo of a gunshot, evidence of a crime I committed and a felony from which I will never be acquitted, destined to eternally stand trial, rolling the boulder up one side of the hill only to have it roll down the other – to start again

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Poetry Journal Sept. 19. 2013

 

 

Sept. 19, 2013

She dresses up like a move star before she makes her appearance. So stunning even hard-boiled pros from our profession stiffed up to take notice, reporting back later about her as well as the trial, her sleek shape reprising a role she’s played before, as if needing to show off for the big wigs like she did at that waterside event, but now she has no camera for a prop, and must play this whole thing out like a silent film, using all she has to draw the stares of men, many of whom have never seen her act before, giving her another Emmy or a golden globe for the part she plays in what might end up a tragedy, she needing to make certain she doesn’t wind up on the wrong side in this drama that might send her boss to jail, a star shinning there when all else seems dim

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Reinventing innocence Sept. 21, 2013

 

No matter what happens next week, she still has her inner turmoil to deal with. If the Virgin Mayor loses, she will likely have to scramble for another job (and will no doubt be enraged about how unfair life is – and she would be right) and will likely look for someone to blame.

Even if he wins his case, she is still dealing with a serious emotional conflict.

I do not know how to read her sudden silence. Is this another aspect of her anguish over lost love or some calculated move I can’t read from the tea leaves?

While I have checked in a few days, her whole food site has not been updated when I last checked, and her art page seems to have been abandoned months ago.

When on top of the food site, she seems to be “protesting too much” or hyping it up to a degree as to make me think something else is going on behind the mask of her cancer cure.

Again, I get the feeling she is trying to send a message to someone (not me) that she is a new person, perhaps alluding to the transmission of her cancer, a kind of damage control that will allow her to show how much she has changed, not just medically, but as a person, and in order to do this, she has to open herself up (or at least, pretend to) so that people might come to trust her again, and perceive her as credible again. This has nothing to do with our mutually assured destruction thing from a year ago when she feared that I might expose her (her relationship to RR, and perhaps other in that inner circle.

Curiously, people tell me she showed up in court this week in the company of RR, which suggests that they are still intimately connected, even if he is not the person with whom she had the affair earlier this year. The Small Man described RR as her protection – although if RR is supposed to be frightening, he hasn’t come off as threatening any of the times I’ve met him over the last year.

The main problem may be her inability to reinvent her innocence. While I have questioned the claim she’s made about being “hardcore,” it is clear she needs to come across that way in order to be accepted by the small niche of corrupt people that have gathered around the Virgin Mayor. After all, if the mayor survives the court case, she still has to deal with these creeps, and she cannot afford to be perceived as weak or vulnerable.

Any move she makes outside the inner circle will need to be a radical one, and it won’t likely feed her need for self-importance, the way some of her gigs over the last three or four years did.

She seems to have gotten a taste for political power, which differs a lot from simply being manager or such in a business, and like those other members of the inner circle (as well as RR who really isn’t, but clings to the shirt tails of the Virgin Mayor), her power comes from the mayor’s position, and it may be extremely difficult for her to find a similar position elsewhere.

She played the Public Relations gig since she got on board with the mayor, making me wonder just how close she is in actuality to her PR boss. Did she trickle up with him the way she did with our owner?

This week’s print edition may also frustrate her since it focuses largely on the Virgin Mayor and who might well replace him if he is convicted.

If all else fails, perhaps she can use her influence on our owner to get another position with us, an unlikely scenario, but one that would drive me crazy since she will still have the owner’s ear and could possibly require my removal as a condition of her return.

Who knows? Anything is possible in this crazy world.

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Poetry Journal Jan. 11, 2024

 

January 11, 2024

 

She reappeared as if a miracle, the same face is not the exact same image, head titled slightly to the left, angled so I could see most of the frame around her, a darker face than the one that was, a slight look of concerned – the slanted lips but especially the all-consuming eyes, the weight of the world on her shoulders as if she is thinking “I’m not too sure about this” after having yanked the previous picture down, all these years later she still fears the unknown, even when she thinks she knows more now than what she knew back then, her face a face I can’t forget, could not even if I wanted to.

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Show time Sept. 20, 2013

 

 

It is autumn, a time of change, so it is fitting that after a year and a half of delays, we finally get to the point of the trial.

A lot of things ride on its outcome, which is why I wonder why she is so silent.

As I said, she did make an appearance in court, so dressed up, even the usual cynical press members I know took notice.

She was part of the parade of people who came to show the Virgin Mayor their support, and perhaps this is about keeping her place in that crumbling insider society when and if the mayor manages to survive.

I ought not complain. A number of our staff – including the current owners – did the same a decade ago when our former owner stood on trial.

She looks terrific when she dresses up. Even D, who briefly replaced her in our office last year, took notice.

Not everybody was pleased with D when he took over, and she had to assure the other insiders that D would be fair, maybe telling them she knew how to control him and perhaps get press almost as positive as she provided when she was in D’s position.

This last is more than a little unfair to her since she stood out as a writer, and really despised hard news – something she often complained to me about, even as our bosses pushed her hard to do more hard news stories, when she excelled and preferred writing features.  And this was why I was so shocked when she tried to bring down the congressman, and suspected she was being used – by RR as it turned out.

  I’m sure she got off on it, poised to become a top notch investigative reporter – but it was RR’s plot, and like she is currently doing with the juicing thing, she became a true-believer in his cause.

She clearly likes being one of the boys (and girls), part of a group of people who have a common cause, and I suspect if and when she finds the right cause, she will be an incredible force for good, and will no longer need to exaggerate her role the way she sometimes tends to these days.

Meanwhile, she has to go through the rituals of power, such as showing up in court, taking her place on stage, and even though she is not testifying, she is on display, not merely for the mayor, but for the other members of the inner circle, telling them she belongs.

If the mayor goes down, then she will need to find a new roost, and people like Joey D are in a position to possibly provide her that opportunity.

I suspect part of her reinventing herself is in preparation to crawl out of one shell and into another, in anticipation of a new role she will have to play.

 

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Poetry Journal Sept. 18, 2013

 

 

Sept. 18, 2013

 

He finally gets his day in court, only everybody is on trial, including her, fate or god less than the jury, passing judgement on a whole way of life, neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, guilty or not, but rather this sense f balance, her universe at the brink, must the way she was long ago on that roof top, only she has no control now of the outcome, as she did then, Will some higher power, some god on high, take away from her what she has clawed her way to achieve, this limited success she sees as a stepping stone on her way to something else? How scared she must be, how unfair thee world seems even when she believes fair and unfair unreal.

Will he, will she, survive? Will she lose all she has hoped for?

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The trial Sept. 19, 2013

 

 

The naming of jurors happened in one day – much more quickly than most people expected.

Prosecution and defense made their opening statements last Friday.

 The prosecutors were very factual, laying out their case that the Virgin Mayor’s son used Google to find a way to hack into the opposition website.

The defense opened with the idea that the Virgin Mayor was under fire from a number of political sharks and that his son was simply trying to protect the father – never disputing the fact that he did the crime.

The prosecutor showed communications between father and son, but failed to demonstrate that the Virgin Mayor instigated the hack.

Still, as of yesterday, the prosecutor had only called up two minor witnesses, not the heavyweight freeholder whose website got hacked.

My friend and political hitman Tom is on the witness list, but he may not have to testify at all.

The defense is playing up that the son did this out of love for his father, and while misguided, it was not malicious.

The whole charge may rest on whether or not prosecutors can prove a conspiracy between father and son and that they deliberately set out to bring down the website.

It is unclear if the mayor or his son will take the stand.

Observers have differing opinions about which way the jury leans, which no doubt has our poet friend biting her nails.

One observer believes the jury is much more open to the emotional argument the defense is making, which provides a bit of hope for the outcome – will she or won’t she have to seek a new job somewhere?

The defense seems to have scored some points in showing that the intimidation was exaggerated if it happened at all.

Next week, the real battle will take place, whether there is a conspiracy and if so, how serious was the outcome.

Our poet and RR made an appearance in the court.

She was dressed to the nines – which some claim is the way she dresses these days, part of her show of power as a political insider.

It is difficult to know if she will survive if the mayor loses the case.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s political enemies clearly see her as the mayor’s operative.

She seems to be playing to the crowd, the way she did during the mayor’s fundraiser – as she apparently did during the party we held for our new magazine last year.

As it turns out, she may have gotten the idea for her miracle cancer cure from a radio broadcast by Imus, who had brought on a guest who claimed it had cured her cancer as well.

Imus as well as my friend, the founder of Gilda’s Club in Newark, believe the cure to be legitimate,

If it is or not is almost beside the point since it is clearly part of her strategy to reinvent herself.

 

 

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Poetry Journal Jan. 14, 2024

 

(This is another contemporary poetry journal entry. I have a few of them over the last couple of months. I figure I’ll get some of these out of the way before I plunge back into 2013 entries, not to mention the remaining entries from those troublesome times during the summer of 2012.)

  

January 1, 2024

 

It is not stardust that gets in our eyes all these years later, but grains of sand, the hour glass, broken, the storm slowly fading away, not yet letting us see a clear view of the past, yet not so blinded as we once were, more a dreamscape of what we once thought as possible, lost in a rage of wind, so we are left with the remnants of the dream, shredded rays still clinging to us after we trudged so far and for so long with the rage of sand set against us, able by luck or fate to have avoided the pitfalls and quicksand we once believes would consume us.

 

 Journal 2024

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Buzzing in her ear Sept. 18, 2013

 

  

Someone from the town she covers and apparently not the poet has been checking in on my blog on a regular basis, perhaps looking for clues of some sort, I can’t tell. This person, whomever it is, has been clicking onto my blog from about 2011 to 2012, or about the time I first met her.

I can’t tell whether it is someone she has confided in – the way she did with our former temporary boss and her Brooklyn stalker – or some other political entity, searching for clues to some mystery I’m not aware of.

On the other hand, she might be using someone else’s computer or smart phone, and is looking for something – although I’m clueless as to what she might find.

But I’m not saying anything negative about her in my posts and so there is nothing to find that she or her allies might use against me, especially that early.

Most of my negative writing about her came during the peak of our conflict late May into mid-August of last year, when I did not know enough to keep my mouth shut, and my cyber nanny could not stop me from posting out of hurt or anger.

I pretty much learned my lesson after she and her parents bushwhacked me on her birthday, and since then I’ve largely been licking my wounds, coming to the realization what an idiot I’d been.

Oddly enough, I like the fact she is looking at what I post, even at those things that are specifically about her (I’ve written a lot about her because writing is how I think, how I cope and how I work through trauma, and it is unnatural for me to use writing as a weapon).

For the most part, I read her poems and listen to her music, her poems providing me with an inkling of how she is doing at the moment. Sometimes, they are so cryptic, I spend hours trying to work out her meaning (better by far than the New York Times crossword puzzle.)

The fact that she went as public in July with her inner feelings still shocks me since it is very much like seeing the hermit crab without its protective shell.

I’m much more transparent. I wear my heart and whatever else on my sleeve, and so it is much easier for her or anybody else to gauge my temperament than it is for me to gauge hers.

I just hate the idea that I have inherited the title of stalker, serving as the foil for whatever relationship she is currently involved in. I’ve done my best to stay out of sight, to become the “clever and elusive” “petulant frat boy” she refers to in several poems, staying at the edge of perception, seeing but not seen, like some annoying insect buzzing in people’s ears.

I sincerely hope she is not too focused on me, not because I’m scared so much as that she seems to have too many other more important things on her plate, and if she is reinventing herself, she needs to focus on them, not me.

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