Relentless attacks in our house of love Oct. 15, 2013

 

GA – our illustrious Hometown blogger – won’t let up on our poet, how that she’s put together the pieces of the political scene and how R is seeking to undermine O’s campaign by using A as a PR saboteur.

GA claims our poet is instrumental in controlling our office (something of an exaggeration since GA and her allies perpetually believe people against the incumbent mayor have control of us, which to some degree is true since our owner will sell his soul for advertising, and is intimately connected to people like Poopie – though Poopie is the one who made the deal with the incumbent mayor in the first place to create a third ticket to keep R from winning.)

GA is assuming our Poet is playing puppet master, pulling our owners strings on behalf of R and those R hired including our poet’s PR boss in the Virgin Mayor’s town.

GA’s source is someone inside our office or someone with intimate knowledge of what goes on in our office (my guess it is our boss, who has her own dirt on the owner, which is why he doesn’t crack down on the boss for routinely fucking up. What dirt this is goes back well before our poet got hired, although she (our boss) did question the poet’s association with the owner in front of me, in front of the owner.

“He (meaning me) seems to think you have a personal relationship with her (meaning the poet),” our boss said one day earlier this year during that whole mess about the gas line photos he (the owner) wanted me to get, and I couldn’t after she (our poet) had shown him the ones she took.”

If it is not our boss, then it is someone with the same level of internal knowledge, making assumptions about the activities of our poet and her friend A. I’ve already concluded that A replaced our poet as a possible spy, either because she got exposed in her attempt to bring down the congressman (the small man spreading the word to other political people) or because our poet refused to go as far as A has in seducing the enemy.

I tend to believe the latter, thinking she trickles up for her own reasons, not as a political pawn.

Perhaps she is being blackmailed by powerful people, I don’t know, and I don’t think so. For all her early morning panic attacks, our poet is and remains her own gal, doing what she needs to do to survive, and not because somebody behind the scenes has given her marching orders.

How much of what GA posts on her blog is true, I can’t say. Sometimes GA is provocative just to boost the hits on her site and build her following. But she seems to know something about what has gone out between our poet and the owner, as well as our poet and our former temporary boss – this last, a bit of vengeance for our former temporary boss’ attempt take her out when he still ran the office when our boss was on maternity leave.

How far GA is willing to go to tell our dirty secrets (real or imagined) is anybody’s guess, though what she’s posted already is extremely damaging (if indeed anyone is actually paying attention).

The silence from our office speaks volumes. So, is the fact that GA has not come after me as well, raising suspicion inside our office that GA and I are in cahoots, when we are not.

I suspect GA doesn’t read our poet’s blog. Otherwise, she might notice that our poet is too wrapped up in her own personal drama to be as deeply involved with those in our office or even the plots being orchestrated by A and R to rig the election.

But I do suspect our owner may be in a panic – although I haven’t caught him checking my work computers recently. Perhaps our former temporary boss is also concerned, and why he keeps laying these traps for me to try and prove I’m someone feeding GA, something he can’t prove, even though last week I told the owner I do speak with GA from time to time, just as I talk to freeholders, mayors and other sources.

Which makes me wonder if our poet tried to get A to get closer to me (maybe not as close as she has with O, but who knows,) and that I might fall apart like I did during those days with the poet more than a year ago. If so, nothing has happened, partly because I don’t feel anything for A the way I did (perhaps still do) in regard to our poet.

I have been reading the poet’s blog and struggle to make sense of some of it, whether or not she is still a true believer in her whole foods thing.

But from time to time, our poet appears to react to something I’ve posted.

 

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Poetry Journal June 15, 2012

 

June 15, 2012

 

She rushed into our office like a chicken with its head cut off, a head as pretty as hers is, she’s on the heels of the biggest story since she’s started with us, only nobody is getting back to her and she’s desperate enough to even speak with me, first asking for help she really doesn’t need, and contacts I have she does, and I’m so grateful for the attention, I make calls to these, telling them to get back to her, which they eventually do, and she’s grateful enough to chat with me later about it all, nothing personal, just two colleagues rehashing facts of the case. It feels like heaven to me, a soft bone tossed to an overly eager puppy, starving for even the least bit of attention, almost, but not quite back to those days when she claimed to be cub and me as her mentor, yet not quite, the quiet after a conflict, neither of us looking too closely at the devastation.

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Poetry Journal June 14, 2012

 

June 14, 2012

 I stare at the empty seat across the table where she sits on Tuesdays, relieved and yet also disappointed, the vacant space like the space left from an extracted tooth, my tongue keeps exploring, feeling at a loss even though it gave me great pain while still there.

This is not a vacancy I can easily fill, dreading the confrontation it brings when she again takes her place at the table, I know the looks I will receive or worse, the lack of them, as if my seat is empty, even though I am seated in it, an invisible man to her, worthless in her eyes, a tragic mistake we both made, only I am the one face of regret, the one who has the most to lose, missing and yet scared of missing her too much, and like a missing limb, I can’t help seeing her even when she’s not there.

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Poetry Journal Oct. 13, 2013

 

Oct. 13, 2013

 I’m not certain what she means by surrender. Is she giving up, throwing in her hand of cards, knowing she can’t win, looking to get out before she loses more than she anticipated, and to whom is she surrendering, to herself, those thought that wake her in the early morning with the rattle of the hamster cage or to the man who she once only wanted to have an affair of the mind, not to me, certainly since whatever went on between us, whatever conflict we engaged in back then, she won – though in winning we both lost and I suspect she lost more than all the rest of us, especially the married man who gets to leave this poker table with all the chips he came with and all hers as well, glancing back perhaps to gloat or if as good as she claims with a look of pity on her.

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That is entertainment Oct. 15, 2013

 

After more than a year and a half of writing about her in my journal and poetry journals, I question what motivates all this time and effort.

Of course, I have always written journals, but have not dedicated as much space to a single subject (except perhaps for Peggy and my ex-wife) and this has me wondering why.

Is it love?

I suppose after a fashion it is, although not romantic love (even if it may have started as that), nor it is the kind of love our former temporary boss has for her, seeing her the way many people might see a wounded bird, someone who needs to be protected, and his kind of love offers it to her in a kind of pity.

I do not pity her – even if at times, I feel sorry for the emotional messes she gets in and out of.

She’s too savvy for pity, perhaps – as she put it – hard core.

While she may play the role of a needy creature, this is just one more guise she adopts in her never ending quest to obtain things: greatness, recognition etc.

She weaves us into her webs, and while she may indeed be vulnerable, she mounts formidable defenses against those who would use and abuse her.

I started writing about her because she was such a mystery, and this evolved into my own defense, as if needing to document my side of a story in which she has the most control.

Since then, my journal has become a different kind of document – the way my journal did back in the 1980s when I wrote about Peggy, as if I knew then she would not survive and someone needed to document her life, even if from my skewed point of view.

The fact that Peggy committed suicide played a huge part in my reaction to our poet’s roof top antics and the photo she sent in reaction to my abandoning her at that bar in May 2012. I was scared history might repeat itself.

Now, I think that is far less likely than I thought during the heat of it all, and having read her work and followed her, I realize if anything she is ultimately a survivor. She may suffer at times yet will always manage to rescue herself (sometimes pretending to allow some shining knight to help her, but most often she’s the one in charge).

Her power over people (over me in particular) scared me back then and still does, and yet I keep going back to see what she posts like a foolish kid who, having been burned more than once by touching the stove, I still touch the stove anyway.

Perhaps, I just want to see the real person that hides inside all those shells she adopts, to get a sense of who she is, and what she really believes.

The fact that she sees herself as hard core matters very little. Most of what I write is speculation, so I have no real clue as to how far she has delved into the dark side (whereas A is much clearer and far less clever at keeping it hidden.)

There is no way to know what is in the cards in the future for our poet; I suspect she’ll keep landing on her feet because even if she is vulnerable inside, she has built a tough shell against enemies, including me.

At some point, I’ll stop writing about her – most likely when she ceases to post poems (which is the stuff I’m intrigued about most because it reveals the most about the real person) and then I’ll have to get back to the silly day to day routine of my rather boring life, documenting what I’ve had for breakfast or supper, and where I went for whatever reason.

In the meantime, this is entertainment, even when it is painful to watch.

 

 (Although I kept writing journal entries long after she ceased posting poetry, my current plan in posting these journals was to cease posting when I reach the point where she resigned from her job with the virgin mayor, just after the last time I saw her at the school renaming for the U.S. Senator. I'm still uncertain about it, since she did post a few poems after leaving her political job. )

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Poetry Journal June 12, 2012

 

June 13, 2012

 It’s my own damned fault, I think, as I hear John Lennon’s voice singing, “I Am the Walrus,” in my head only I hear it as “pizza man” not Eggman, and realize I was supposed to another of her “working things out fucks,” and I turned it into something else, something ugly, something it was never meant to be, while I ached for it to be something it could never be, and realize it is my own damned fault, thinking about the playwright she wrote about aching to be bad if just for one night, and turning it into art instead, while she was bad and liked it, until I ruined it and turned it all into something ugly, dream turned into nightmare we both have to live through until maybe someday one or both of us wakes up.

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Poetry Journal June 12, 2012

 

June 12, 2012

 I read the story she wrote that caused ush an uproar, about an unsuspecting fool delivering pizza, a fiction account of a man carrying this wilting box stained red with sauce into the mouth of a fly trap where women wait to use and abuse him, and I wish it was me, shocked at myself for thinking this, scared that the reality is far, far worse, her control over me only without the brief moment of joy before the jaws of the fly trap snaps shut, the bliss of the innocence most men feel before they find out they have been used, and I wonder when she writes about this, about some other woman who laid out her private fantasy, whether or not she wished she was that woman and just who she saw in her head playing in part in this seduction, and whether or not it is fiction at all in her head or what she does already.

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Poetry Journal Oct. 26, 2013

 

 

You can feel it in the air you breathe

This thing that floats around us,

And gets inside us,

And flows through us with our blood

A thing that is not us

Ye becomes us,

Taking us over

From the inside out,

Altering how we think

Or live

Or act,

Not love, not any more,

Something that dresses up as love

And fools us into believing it is.

Though now, a whole year or so later

The feeling persists,

Of missed things,

Opportunities recklessly cast away

Leaving a bitter landscape

When trust is a stranger

And hope an illusion,

Knowing this is on the brink

Of some greater chapter,

We cannot specifically predict,

Yet feel its motion,

Like a freight train

Rushing around inside of us,

Looking for a way to burst out,

Each day a bit closer

To a conclusion we do not wish

To occur, yet feel coming,

Inevitably

And she

On the forefront

Waiting

 

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Poetry Journal Oct. 12, 2013

 

Oct. 12, 2013

 I don’t believe it; I refuse to believe it, regardless of what the Hometown blogs say, and maybe this is proof that she’ll only go so far to honor her commitments to the clutch of characters she’s hooked up with, and perhaps, she even put her foot down, forcing those others to find someone else to do what she won’t do.

In this scummy world full of scummy people, she seems the least tainted, desperate to fit in when fitting in means doing something beyond the pale of what she’s even done before, even if the old woman on that cruise long ago taught her how, doing for herself is different from doing for someone else, so I refuse to believe, maybe I’m as blinded by the light as all the others who love her are, seeing what I want or need to see, rather than what is, needing all this not to be true if only for my own sake.

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You will miss me when I’m gone Oct. 14, 2013

 

As with many of her previous poems, it is possible to read into this poem what I want, rather than what is.

This was made obvious with what I pointed out yesterday involving the similarities to the openings of my poem and hers.

It is also easy to think this poem is aimed at me – especially after having been in the same place at the same time with her.

But this would be wishful thinking.

The only poems I can absolutely say were aimed at me came during the summer of 2012, and those were poems of open rage.

And since the vast majority of the poems posted since the beginning of the year seem to be to or about the man she fell in love with, I have to assume this poem follows suit.

Aside from the question as to whom the poem is aimed, there is the question as to who is doing the surrendering, him or her.

The poem suggests that they have arrived back at a place of uncertainty, where things are unclear.

She calls the dim light “bipolar” and uncertain whether it is coming or going, alluding I think to my reference of a reluctant dawn.

Things, she says, are not what you were told they seem to be when growing up.

Life is much more confusing. a “tizzy indecisive” mixture of yes and now, maybe, “I think, but now and then yes” all in the bottle like an explosive fusion “until you surrender.”

Taken in context with her other poems, and the growing frustration she has had trying to lure him back to her arms, her bed and her life, this poem appears to be saying the confusing messages she has gotten from him, the yes he’ll return, no he won’t, well, maybe yes, she is ready to give up and get on with her life.

After all, what other options does she have?

This continues a theme she espoused in two of her recent poems, about pressing so hard against each other as to leave permanent marks in each, and the poem about disarming.

The first of these saying that their interaction has changed both of them forever, and that he will remain inside her forever -- something akin to the old cliché “you will miss me when I’m gone.”

The second poem, as pointed out in a previous journal entry says that he drew her out of a “numb existence” and has since thrown her away.

The three poems when considered together suggest that contact with this man has left a lasting impression, and that he has disarmed her usual caution, and has left her vulnerable again and lost, and that she can no longer deal with the constant indecision.

These poems come at a time when her best laid plans have been laid bare and she is clearly wounded.

Why she alludes to my poem is a mystery to me.

I would like to think that she did so as a signal, and that she would like someone other than those emotionally compromised to understand the turmoil she is going through.

But since we have no direct contact, she’s never emailed and texted in a year, this idea may be simply fantasy on my part, wishing I still played a role in her life, other than villain.

 

 

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Poetry Journal June 11, 2012

 

June 11, 2012

 I cease to exist, the way a shadow does under sudden scalding light, never substantial to start with, not even a memory, not even a ghost feeling drained, as if she feeds off what was until there is nothing left to feed off of, I feel my breathing, and know from it I am here, only I can’t see myself or perhaps the mere outline of what I have been, a child’s coloring book or a paint by numbers art work, needing someone or something to fill in the appropriate colors so I can exist again, wishing she would be the one, her artistic fingers holding the paint brush or crayon that recreates me, though I know she never will, and I am as invisible to her as to myself.

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Poetry Journal June 10, 2012

 

June 10, 2012

 When she buries it, she digs deep, pats the loose soil until it is solid again.

Then moves on, leaves no roses to remember it by, not even looking bck except in dread that it might rise up out of the earth to harm her, feeling nothing else over its loss, just the practicality of being rid of it, once it has gone, she in the window of her kitchen, smoldering cigarette between her lips, her brother playing music on a paper clip, the only dirge love gets once it is dead, like a bad joke, or worse, one with a predictable punch line, she, piling on, pushing this thing she never wanted bac down just to keep it from haunting her again, a presence in the present she needs to keep in the past, it, me or whatever else, an afterthought, an engraved memory on a marble slab or perhaps, not even that, a lost soul among all those other lost souls buried beside it.

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poetry journal Oct. 10, 2013

  

Oct. 10, 2013

 She’s invented a new danced called the Herky-Jerky, needing to get out all the tension she must have felt over the last year and a half since she first broke the story (thanks to her close associated RR) about the mayor’s arrest – a totally different use of handcuffs than she is likely used to, dancing because her life doesn’t come to a screeching end and the mayor keeps on being mayor, at least for the times being, no more odd men in trench coats and badges stalking everyone even remotely connected with him (do they know more about what went on behind the scenes than the indicted suggests), she dancing the way a teen does after getting away with playing hooky, and no truant officer to hold anyone accountable for anything. She dances because the shackles are off and she can move freely again, herking and jerking in rare joy.

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Poetry Journal Oct. 11, 2013

 

Oct. 11, 2013

 I hear the old 1960s song “Secret Agent Man” in my head when I think of her, reversing the gender to suit the role she trying to play, “a spy in the house of love,” who settles for power when she can’t find love, needing to fit in with her new friends who she think need her to do what she does best, Mata Hari, who men cannot resist, vulnerable, playing the part of the perpetual victim who men love to protect, still peeved at being exposed, unhooded, making her almost useless in the current campaign, replaced by someone who has the lack of ethics and guilt to do the job property.

It is not like she lacks the skills to do what her replacements does, she has trickled up for year, only for herself, not for others, a moral distinction her replacement cannot/will not make and this is what makes our poet special, she has a conscience even in the midst of corruption.

 

 

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Call and response maybe Oct. 10, 2013

 

I’ve fallen so far behind in all this, much of what I started to write is already out of date.

So, I’ll just start with the latest and work my way back to the point where our poet had her so-called relapse.

The old concept that God opens a window when he closes a door applies to negative stuff as well as positive, and this may well also apply to her latest posts, one of which may or may not be a response to something I’ve posted.

(Before the event with the congressman, I had assumed for the most part that I had fallen off her radar and come to believe that I was reading into some of her work what I wanted to see rather than what really was there. Now I’m not so sure.)

Her last post came within minutes of my posting mine, and could be seen as a response to what I posted, connected in some ways to A.

For some time, I suspected A as being the good cop in a good cop/bad cop routine. She continued to keep in touch with me even after things got particularly strained with the poet.

So, when I shut things off with A, the powers behind A and possibly the poet may have reverted to their original strategy of stalking.

This comes at a time when GA, the Hometown blogger, has been slamming both of them on her blog.

Again, all this may be the result of my vivid imagination, although GA seems to think everything involving A and the poet as some kind of trap.

And indeed, it may all be mere coincidence that the poet decided to post the rest of a story she partially posted about a cheating married man who wanted to have sex with a much younger bar fly she put up back when we first met.

I thought the original was a metaphor for what went on between us, but looking back, I realize it must have been about a number of men, most likely older than she was, all of whom desired her despite their marriages.

A number of questions arise from this; Is this a reaction to seeing me again after almost a year, reminding me of ill feelings? Or is she sending a message to the married man she has apparently got involved in, a parting shot after a long and lingering break up? Or it just mere coincidence, including the timing of it being posted within minutes of me posting something on my site?

But she posted a newer poem this week which seems to support the conclusion that she is talking about and to the married man from earlier this year, even though this was posted within minutes of my posting last night (and even though it also repeats some of the images from what I posted, again stirring up some confusion or perhaps her desire to send mixed messages as she had done in previous poems.

“I go to the sea aching for a dawn that refuses to come,” I wrote, “Mists cloud my eyes with a gray I don’t have, but does not feel like day, but rather a fading out of darkness into light with no real distinction as to where one ends and the other begins.”

The poem goes on to say that life is more about subtle charges rather than abrupt ones, and then talks about how difficult it is to breathe in clean air after having suffered the polluted air of the city. But when polluted air is all we have, we must breathe it to survive, and even this pure place with waves washing over my feet, leaves the grit of sand to remind me pure isn’t always as pure as it would seem.”

In retrospect, my posting actually might seem like a response to her cheating story, but it isn’t because I was unaware of her posting the expanded story until I got back. I wrote mine while still in Cape May.

As I said her follow up poem came almost instantly after I posted mine.

I won’t give a full account of her poem in this journal entry but will only point out the similar images. For instance, she opens with a similar image as mine “It’s that certain light again that one that is neither half-lit or half extinguished,” uncertain sky of dusk “unsure whether it is coming or going.”

After that opening, she appears to refocus on the matter at hand, a message to or about her former lover, but the opening clearly seems to reference my poem, and adds to the confusion as to whether she is responding to me or possibly using what I’ve posted as inspiration, or as I’ve supposed more than once, all this might just be one vast coincidence, or – equally likely – a way of referencing me while the subject of the poem is about someone else.

Anyway, I’ll do more about her poem tomorrow if I have time.

 

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The replacement Oct. 8, 2013

 

What may have transpired – although I have no proof that our poet has been working in the role of stealth operative for the political inner circle – A seems to have taken up that role instead.

Since the our poet and A are supposedly barhopping friends, our poet might have recruited A to serve as a saboteur in the Hometown election, working as PR for O’s third party campaign, while secretly employed by candidate R, who sees O as in league with Poopie and the incumbent mayor, and is using A to destroy O’s campaign from within.

Close once to A, it is hard to tell if our poet held any of this against her.

Although our poet reportedly tried to seduce the Hometown Democratic chairman, I doubt she could go so far as A has to undermine O (A is sleeping with O and living in his former girlfriend’s condo while being paid a hefty amount by Poopie – who is blind to the treachery).

R’s campaign – in particular the PR guy who is our poet’s boss in the Virgin Mayor’s town – may not feel confident our poet can pull off the scam – partly because she has earned the distrust of the congressman and the Small Man. If she was to pop up at O’s PR person, a lot of red flags would go up, alerting Poopie and the incumbent mayor to the plot.

A had some conflict with her fiancé -- broke up – perhaps because of her politics or some other activity. She got pregnant, had an abortion, although she claims her finance threw her down the stairs causing a miscarriage. She became homeless as a result of the breakup, and O, feeling kindly towards her, allowed her to sleep on his couch, and according to A, they did not get involved.

What the real story is, I can’t say. Maybe she got pregnant as a result of some barhopping adventure with our poet, or maybe Carmelo, or somebody else she didn’t want to confess about to her fiancé.

O’s relationship with his girlfriend was already on the rocks by the time A came into her life, and his girlfriend moved out of her own condo one day and the next day, A moved in, just in time for O to declare his run for mayor.

He hired her on as her PR person Poopie paying the bill, a brilliant scheme by R, whose campaign is broke and could not hire her openly, and so managed to shift her salary onto the backs of O’s money man.

And then she began to dismantle his election, writing a letter to the paper on his behalf the humiliated the quarterback for the New York Giants, who happened to live in Hometown at the time.

Our poet, I think, saw an opportunity to polish her PR skills evaporate, one more setback after she spent the summer trying to reinvent herself.

Both A and our poet have been under relentless fire from GA, the Hometown blogger, who is aligned with the incumbent mayor and sees the whole plot for what it is and has accused our writer D (who replaced our poet and later A) as slanting stories, even posing questions in the debate we hosted that were opening anti-incumbent mayor.

If our poet had hoped to get a fresh start in Hometown, all this is working against her, and may explain why she was less than exuberant at the vindication of the Virgin Mayor. She may have anticipated much more than she got.

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Poetry Journal Jan. 17, 2024

 

January 17, 2024

 I never stop loving the people I loved even when they cease loving me, you don’t close a spigot once its open, the flow just goes where it will and all you can do is flow with it, suffering through the droughts when they come, drowning in the floods, the unpredictable nature of it as varied as weather, the need of it outweighs the burden you carry when loves becomes something other than you presumed, that soul you held your heart out to remains the same, even in the varying degrees of hot and cold, the on and off, the rage she might express in response, love is love, no matter what.

 

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Poetry Journal June 9, 2012

 

June 9, 2012

 You can’t’ read tea leaves if there are no teal leaves to read, this limbo we have settled in, passing professional message via our professional media, locking up forever any personal exchanges, methadone that keeps the patient alive, if not thinking, waiting for the conditions that brought about the need to cease, the ache most coming during those days of the week when there are no professional messages to send, the ache for what once transpired most acute, if only in knowing these old, sometimes tender exchanges can never occur again, a silence to all encompassing, it is deafening, leaving everything in a vacuum, this inner space as devoid of life as outer space, and yet, we still exist in the same orbit, and still see each other in passing, even if she has moved on to explore new possibilities.

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28 miles March 23, 2024

 

(poetry journal)

 

The sign said, 28 miles to Kingston.

We had not intended to come this far north, taking a trek along River Road that turned into 9W, following signs that said, “Bear Mountain.”

Only when we got there, we kept going, this long and winding thing, and then, we stopped at the sign saying “28 miles” because we had never intended to go there, not yet, not since I took my daughter there before COVID, seeking a bit of the East Village she could no longer find in NYC, we stopped and wet back, leaving the sign and its destination behind, for another time, for our annual overnight stay when we were better prepared to deal with the consequences, 28 miles turning into 30, then more as we made our way home.

 

(Journal)

We were a half an hour south of Kingston when decided to turn back south,

We had not intended to go so far north but had followed a highway that started near our town and snakes its way along the Hudson going north. We wanted to see where it went and if it was a less tedious route than the usual one we took to the Woodstock area.

And it turned out to be an amazing trek – if not for the fact we got lost twice on the way back, a long and winding road north that turned into a nightmare when we wound up in the extreme northern suburbs of Bergen County.

We had intended to check out Bear Mountain, which was an amazing landscape when we passed through it, and expected to stop at the Wick Diner in East Rutherford for dinner on our way back – plans that changed when I could not get the GPS on my cellphone to tell me exactly where we were and eventually stumbled around until we found the Parkway and took that south, getting caught up in the insane traffic at key exits such as Route 80 and Route 46.

Route 3 was less cumbersome, and we stopped off at the Tick Tock Diner – the last vestige of the world where I had worked nearby in a print shop.

Mick Jaeger was on the menu for a meal he had ordered during the Rolling Stones’ last visit to Giants Stadium.

I ordered a hamburger and fries, instead, before we took the last few miles back to home, setting aside Kingston for another trip later.

 

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