She has a never-ending need for affirmation, casting out lines as if to catch someone, maybe the only one, who can fill that need, someone who can fit into her life, someone who will neither cling nor run away – as one of her poems from early this year pointed out.
In a later poem, she bemoaned her fate at having short term relationships.
The pattern of her life also determines where she works and what career she will pursue.
What a disappointment life must be having once sung before an audience of 23 million people to end up in an office filled with balding old men, clawing her way up a constantly shrinking ladder of success to find herself with fewer and fewer options, and even here, she sees her passage up blocked by someone she believes is trying to derail her.
For a time before I began to understand her better, I was indeed jealous at the fact she could get whatever she wanted – as The Eagles once said – with just smile.
In the past, she had more choice, more options, but as several of her poems point out, she is fighting just to not fall back into the pit which many women fall into as they age – the pit my one time love, Peggy fell into when she aged out of the strip club business, the same pit some of the groupies from the bands fell into.
If this doesn’t work, what are her options?
She is incredibly talented in art, dance, music, cooking and now writing. She sees herself as a player, a street savvy woman who fights to control her own destiny.
But this is the great fallacy of her life.
She swims with sharks, bares her teeth like a shark, but she’s really only a guppy, and yet needs to keep moving, to keep the illusion of being tough so as to not get eaten by real sharks.
She needs her paranoia as a survival tool, a kind of sonar to give her warning of approaching danger, so she can scoot beyond their reach.
She has no choice but to swim, unable to do anything but what she has always done, unable to steer too far from the sharks off whom she must feed, all the time trying not to get bitten when she has plenty of scars to show just how close she has come.
You have to wonder at what point will she be able to get into waters where the sharks cannot go, where she might find peace, and perhaps find a stream of success, able to use her immense talents without being used by others.
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