If the poem she posted yesterday was defiant, today’s poem
highlights just how vulnerable she believes she is., and how betrayed she
feels, not just by me, but by our former temporary boss whom she previously
trusted, and now, does not.
This is perhaps an unfair assessment because looking back at
it, he really did not betray her, a fact she will likely come to realize
eventually and continue on with him as friends, mending bridges clearly
impossible to mend with me.
As with yesterday’s
poem, this poem reflects and over reaction, panic and mistrust that will likely
calm over time, but will never get back to where it had been previously.
She describes it as a cold mistrust that breaks through a positive
heat, affecting her stomach and causing her hands to shake.
She finds herself remote from herself, looking down at the
whole mess with confusion.
She claims she does not normally panic at high-risk things –
she has lived her life on the edge. It’s the ordinary stuff that gets her, such
as steady breathing, answering the telephone, going out for anything other than
work – still worse, sleeping.
The poem uses the metaphor of a fish bowl which distorts
reality, regardless of whether you are inside the bowl or outside. Reality is
warped by the glass, and appears alarmed at how changed that reality is, she
catching glimpses of things she thought steady, but have changed, causing her
to panic.
The inside and outside the fish bowl metaphor may well be a comparison
to how she sees things and other people outside see her world – but this may be
stretching her meaning.
She says, she can’t even trust her own thinking, because she
has failed to expect betrayal, when it appears she has been betrayed before.
Why had it taken her by surprise? She should have expected
it.
What she assumed was one thing, turned out to be something
else, not just this time, but every time.
The poem goes on to ask what can be trusted. Can she even
trust her own perceptions (through the warped lens of the fish bowl) and perhaps
she has fooled herself by not expecting to be betrayed?
The poem’s self-doubt tends to make the tone of defiance in
her previous poem ring hollow, even though both reactions can be valid.
But she is clearly not as strong as yesterday’s poem
implied, and is extremely vulnerable as this poem points out, raising the
fundamental question is to how she can trust someone else when she can’t even
trust her own perceptions.
She should have known she would be betrayed based on her
experiences in the past.
Unasked in this poem, and so unanswered is what can she do to
keep it from occurring in the future?
There is a tone of fatalistic hopelessness in this poem, as
if she believes she can’t stop it from happening again either.
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