What comes across most out of this study of her poetry is a pattern of self-perception.
She apparently sees herself as savvy, street wise player destined for greatness, someone who when gets her foot in the door of an establishment, is bound and determine not to stop until she gets to the top. And it doesn’t stop there
She told one of the office gossips that our office was just a stepping stone to some other bigger and better career opportunity. Which is just as well because in an office as small as ours there really isn’t any place for her to ascend to – unless she is looking to replace the boss and take her corner office. But the boss really is a savvy street fighter and I doubt she will be moved by a new comer after having invested nearly a decade getting herself to the top as she has.
Unless the owner creates a new position, there is no place for a new comer to go without pushing someone else out.
I don’t count myself in that since I’m have no real clout, something I think she mistook when she came after me back in March.
In the past, she has always wound up in places where there was room at the top, where she could move effortlessly from novice to pseudo boss.
In her poems, she depicts herself as victim or heroine, on a personal crusade to greatness.
She wants to be in control, not just of her inner self, but of the circumstances in which she is forced to exist, and she has learned routines that help her weave through this maze of other people’s intentions, time giving her the unique ability to outsmart and out maneuver people who might otherwise want to do her harm.
Yet for as savvy as she claims to be, she is also naïve, looking for that Cinderella end that never comes. She gets used by players who seem savvier than she is, and in almost every poem there is this intense desire for control, how to keep her life as her own, when in almost all cases, it seems to slip away from her.
There is great pain in some of her poems, legitimate pain, some clearly caused by me, although not always intentionally. There is fear, too, of dark things on the periphery of her existence she can’t see or describe against which she must muster her whole strength to survive.
This comes at great cost – because as some poems show, she is not nearly as ruthless as she needs to be to thrive in the world, she most often finds herself in, some poems showing real empathy even for those she considers her enemy.
Yet, time has taught her she needs to claw her way to get what she wants, and is clever enough, brilliant enough, sometimes ruthless enough to get it for a time, yet as one of her most recent poems points out, there are always people waiting to snatch it back from her.
Ultimately, her poems – going back to before I even met her (and those poems she posted on her previous website years earlier – depict great sadness, since all life stories come to the same end over time, and her poems often reflect the sadness even of the journey itself, for all the company she has, all of the people who profess to love her, of all those who flatter her with complements, she is fundamentally alone.
And the hard part is the fact that she knows it.
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