He still only guesses that the owner dislikes him, but not why, still bitter at being denied the job he was promised, and thinks that’s because the owner dislikes him, too.
We don’t talk about her when he calls, although her presence is everywhere like a haunting spirit neither of us can get rid of, and he doesn’t want to.
We chit chat about everything but her, going round it as if we were circling a black hole, one false move and we both get sucked up into it.
I dare not ask if he saw her picture in the magazine in which she is posing as if fighting with a professional boxer, what he might have thought about it, did he wish he was the boxer she posed with?
Her last few posts and some Facebook messages seemed aimed at people who are giving her advice, in one message she saying, “even mentors are human,” as if disparaging them.
Although he was her mentor in our office, I can’t believe she meant him in these. He’s too dedicated to her. He would lay down and let her walk over him to avoid any possible disaster.
We can’t talk about that either, whether he saw what I saw, and did he believe he was the subject and did he feel hurt by it, if he did.
I want to comfort him, to assure him that he would be the last person she would do that to, but since we can’t talk about her, I can’t help him, and all I can do is wonder, and chit chat about subjects that have nothing and yet everything to do with her, those safe steps beyond the black hole’s rim, those steps we have to watch out for, each time we talk.
I tell myself he’s a big boy, who has stepped over fiery coals before, learning from experience, and yet, he’s almost as innocent as she is, (she might be) and I think there’s nobody else he can confide in except for me, but won’t, can’t, scared I’ll betray him again.
So, he must walk through the fire alone, perhaps scared, certainly wondering what he did wrong, if she meant him in those poems.
She took down her poem about stepping out of her comfort zone from her poetry blog, and then posted it again on her Facebook page, and coupled with the Facebook post about mentor’s being human, it seems as if sending a message.
A week later, she replaced the poem she removed from her blog with a longer poem that says pretty much the same thing but with an added cavate suggesting no matter how hard she works or sage advice she gets, she won’t get what she wants without another more important ingredient: luck.
In some ways, she seems to be trying to convince herself that her methods are acceptable partly because being noble doesn’t result in anything – at least, not anything she desires.
The poem is divided into several parts, the first of which deals with her everyday struggles and her determination to distinguish between her ambitions as opposed to what other people are telling her what she ought to do.
The second par deals with what is noble as opposed to what gets her what she wants, nobility of purpose vs outcome – and her own lack of vision for what she hoped to achieve.
The third part deals with the proverbs of life people often hand her, about waiting, about patience, about love and about achievement. And while these may have relevance at times “in their elusive ways, life goes on happening anyway.”
The fourth part says life is a series of moments strung together, and while her efforts might be noble, but in looking at herself she sees age creeping up on her. Her struggle is a matter of getting up after every fall. But success is less about effort than it is about luck.
She seems very confused. People are advising her, but she’s not sure they’re right, and she struggles against what they want for her and what she wants for herself.
She needs to be able to tell the difference, even though she is no longer sure exactly what she wants.
She seems fed up with being noble because it hasn’t gotten her what she wants, and she is wearing of waiting for success that never comes. She no longer believes that hard work will get her what she needs.
The poem opens with a metaphor of her struggle, a kind of swimming against the tide and by the spreading confusion she is confronted with every day.
She tries to “rise above” these things and to the right thing –while trying to distinguish between what she wants and what other people tell her what she ought to want—advice given her in her “supposed best interest.”
This passage echoes the advice she quoted in her earlier poem about stepping out of her comfort zone and references she made on her Facebook page about mentors being only human after all.
She is clearly struggling to maintain her vision, and resist those being imposed upon her, but the task is exhausting.
The poem goes on to describe the physical impact, the feeling of melting bones, even her hair hurts. She sometimes forgets to breathe.
She falls, then picks herself up, not by the proverbial bootstraps, but by “carefully starched shirt tails” with connotes several things, her ambition to be a professional rather than the mundane working-class bootstraps might imply. But shirt tails also has another meaning as something small, trivial, or short typically to the point of inadequacy.
Do this often enough, she comes to realize that no matter how noble the effort it, it has little to do with resolve.
Nor can she be sure that the ultimate outcome is what she had originally intended for herself.
She is striving for independence in these passages, trying not to be dependent on someone else, because she can never be sure who to credit with the ultimate success and whether she is being steered into something different from what she wanted in the first place.
As in the previous poem, she quotes well-intentioned cliches. But with a difference.
In the previous poem, the cliches were about how to cope with her fear and forcing herself out of her comfort zone. In this poem, the cliches are about patience, about waiting to get what she wants, or other such nonsense of being the early bird, or to quote John Lennon, life is something that happens when you’re busy making other plans.
And trying to untangle these bits of sage advice, she comes to the conclusion they might not be relevant at all. “Shit happens,” she concludes, only she doesn’t use the word “shit.”
The poem eventually comes back to a philosophy she has espoused most of her life about living “moment to moment,” and she concludes that life is moments strung together, and her life has been a matter of adapting to these, even when they sometimes divert her from her original goals. Yet for all her planning, all of her hard work, she comes to realizes that everything boils down to pure luck.
This poem continues a theme from the last three of four though seems to take it to a new level, beyond just the struggle to get what she wants and needs to the point in which she feels she has no control over the outcome, and all the sage advice from all the well-meaning people who would guide her, without luck, she’s not going to achieve anything, regardless of how hard she tries.
I must have listened to this song of hers a million times (a gross exaggeration, but a few hundred times might not be), without fully realizing its full impact, or even what the song is really about.
I took it for a typical heart break song – even though her brilliant singing supported by well-crafted jazz-like musical arrangement made it more than typical pop stuff from the radio.
As with her poetry, however, the song and its performance says a lot about her and her past, how detached she can appear on the surface even when internally in total emotional turmoil.
Even more so, the song reveals a past that is full of love won and love lost, of deception and self-deception, and depth of anguish and her ability to strike back through her art.
The song seems to show her ability to maintain her public composure even when she is being torn apart emotionally in private.
The song is being sung to someone she clearly loved, but a man who had found excuses not to be with her, a man who makes claims about her he is using as excuse to move on.
Although performed sophistically, the song has a basic pop structure (modified slightly) with verses and chorus, but with a moderate jazz substructure, and powerful singing. We get an intro that includes drums and piano, an interlude between choruses of piano, drums and guitar, and an outro that is a reprise of the intro. Clever piano tinkering comes just prior to the singing and fills in at points later in the song.
Although this is a break up song, it never mopes. The is no musical melodrama. The music never falters even when the lyrics depict some painful emotional past, leaving this to her amazing voice, at those moments when it shifts out of the didactic verses and gets pumped up by the clear pain of the chorus, her voice often slipping into – if not jazz scat – then into something that resembles yet another instrument, weaving below and around the other instruments before returning to the verses again.
Yet as well crafted as the musical component is (and it is truly tight especially when the instruments make brief but potent shifts in tempo and key), it is the lyrics that stunned me most during more recent listening, after having failed to truly appreciate what was being said and how it was being said prior to this. In my defense, I was lulled in previous listening by the power of her voice, failing to appreciate her craft as a poet and songwriter.
Her voice has the ability to entice a listener into listening to its ups and downs and its emotional turmoil, rather than paying full attention to the other things going on in her songs – and in this song in particular.
The stunning part of her lyrics is that she wrote them in her late teens or early twenties, demonstrating her deep understanding of romantic entanglement, and in this song, a struggle going back “across the years.”
She reflects on her disillusionment with a man who she claims once seemed to sparkle, but no longer does.
But the poem is a kind of one-sided boxing match in which she is taking jabs at him, getting even for the hurt she feels he’s caused her.
“Where were you when the hand outs were given?” she sings, possibly making reference to an old insult asking: “where were you when God handed out brains?”
But then, she goes on to question his sincerity, asking: “Where were you went a smile was just a smile,” suggesting his smile can’t be trusted and that his smile might mean something else.
“I always wondered when prudence passed you by,” she sings.
This song like some of her poems is her chance to strike back at the man who has wounded her deeply, and to make it clear he has no regard for the way she feels.
“If it helps you to pretend, I’m not feeling anything, help you to forget me,” she sings. If it fits to think I never loved you, then that’s what you should do.”
She alters the chorus slightly later, but continues to make case in the next verse, saying she’s tired for all the feelings of emptiness, and perhaps alludes to something he did, which included “a rose and good bye,” – explaining why she later claimed to hate people giving her flowers and candy.
Yet even though she has put on a face of apparent contentment, the whole affair seems to have been more than she could bear, looking back again at what happened to her.
“Where were you when the time came for us to meet?” she sang, then makes it clear that he took advantage of her when she was still an innocent child.
But she knew the routine already, just as she already knew how to cry.
In her return to the final chorus, she alters the content to say he would like to pretend that she is not human, but if he needs to believe she never loved him, then that’s what he should do.
This song stunned me because of the fact that her art was so sophisticated so early in her life. But so did the fact that she had such deep and painful romances upon which she could draw to create that art.
But as she said, she knows the routine, and she knows how to cry.
The condition of our former temporary boss shocked me.
He looked old and haggard, a slight yellowish tint to his skin that suggest some inner condition still too early to diagnosis, an ailment just making itself a home in him that might later express itself more meanly.
He might have looked this way for months, escaping my notice because I talked to him over the telephone but rarely saw him.
Her name did not come up; we had so much else to talk about.
Superstorms like Sandy left as much human wreckage as it did flooded streets, perhaps explaining how down and out he seemed.
He seemed more bitter than usual, focused particularly on the two owners.
He felt their open hostility towards him, especially from the male owner who seemed to go out of his way to disrespect him.
“They’re afraid of me,” he told me over dinner last night. “They don’t want to give me too much power.”
The male owner and he had been sniping at each other for months.
But he has seemed most lost since she left in October, her presence bolstering his ego at a time when our company did its best to make him feel unimportant.
She made him feel significant.
Why she did this is less imperative now than the fact of mutual benefit, she encouraged him at times when he felt particularly down, and out of this came some legitimate feeling.
Her forced resignation left a vacancy in his life, nobody else can fill. For all the disrespect he gets here, his job seems incredibly important to him, and she—while here – acted as a crutch, someone he would lean on at times when he could lean on nothing else.
But she seems to have moved on.
While no doubt she keeps in contact with him as she does one of the office gossips and most likely the male owner as well, it is not the same intimacy they had working together.
Her poems about moving out of her comfort zone and about how she ought to have found success, speak about lessons learned over the last year and suggests that mentors, who have tried to guide her, are merely human after all.
This last was something she posted on her Facebook page, and may have been a message to him, perhaps suggesting that she has moved beyond him as her mentor as well.
Whatever plans she has for the future, he does not appear to be part of them, something sad considering everything.
I know this sounds silly, but when I first met her cats when I first went up to her apartment, I thought I had stepped into a scene from Bell, Book and Candle; she was a witch, and her cats her familiars – a vague notion I still have since she seems to be able to cast a spell over those who come into her life.
Even the art work on the walls of her apartment (most of it her own) reminds me of the shop in the movie, and she has the same air as that witch, as if she knows she can cast a spell on people and there is nothing any of those who fall under it can do about it.
Her cats rub against the legs of the men who come into her life to see if they are worth, and perhaps enhance the atmosphere that consumes them, helping her to make it hard for those men to think – not drunk on the wine she serves, but their own hormone she stirs up, which makes them stagger around her witch’s den, not able to come or go without her guidance. A man goes in at his own peril and emerges from it, not so much unscathed as unchanged. Meeting her, breathing the same air she breathes, occupying the same space as her, changes you – not for good or bad, you just come out of it different.
So powerful is her spell on some men that they might sell their souls to remain under it – some try, but mostly fail, while many of those who profess to love her fall out of her spell and wander off.
She is alone far more often than she should be, although she always has her cats. They may be her truest friends, always there for her, demanding only food, water and a clean litter pan, keeping her company in her bed without drama. They do not pass judgement on her, purring when she pets them, leaving her along (except to walk across the keyboard of her computer) when she leaves them alone.
They are fiercely independent much in the way she wishes she could be.
For all her ability to put men under her spell, she is far too lonely far too often, and perhaps believes her spells have backfired on her. Perhaps, all spells of such kind of temporary, and come with a heavy price for temporary pleasure, each spell enacting a cost that makes it more difficult to perhaps find love that is not generated by a quick fix spell, making those moments of exhilarating joy shorter and those days (and nights) of loneliness longer, perhaps even seemingly endless, forcing her to cling to what joy she can get when she can get it, even if her familiars suggest the person under her temporary spell is not worthy.
In those last few moments all I could do was call his name; all he could do was purr, a ritual we’d engaged in since his birth in early 1999, a call and response that had tied our lives together in a way only undying love could, and here he was dying, and I had to let him go.
No human or animal had ever attached itself to me the way this cat had, he needing me so utterly, I could do nothing but reciprocate – love for love, need for need, call and response.
Even as I stood with him in the vet’s office, I knew this was the final act in a year full of such pain, of doubt about what has been and what was bound to come, full of life’s deceptions to which I contributed my share, an appropriate conclusion to a conflict I had tried to keep remote, separate from those things I cared deeply about, trying not to be cynical about everything – the office and the strange people who struggled there meaningless at moments like these.
My fingers stroked his fur even as the vet eased the needle of death into the cat’s leg, searching for a vein that could endure this one last insult life issued before expiring.
I still call him Tiny Tug, even though I knew his father, Big Tug, has expired years earlier, laying down his life in the tumble of trees behind our house, pausing on his way to death to bid us farewell, he like Jelly (Little Tug’s mother) knowing how we kept sacred of earlier kittens they hadproduced no one thought would ever survive the wilds, Jelly nudging this one tiny accident-prone and pathetically-breathing kitten through our back door for safe keeping, and he (Little Tug) latching onto me as mother, father and best friend, sleeping with me at night, clinging to me day by day as if he expected me to expire before he did, or leave him the way his real parents did, comforted by my voice or touch now as the tender mercy of the vet’s needle too him out of this troubled world and into that other place beyond pain or sorrow.
No real safe place in this world of ours, no comfort zone, no words of wisdom that I might impair, he relying on me to know what is best, when we as humans often don’t know what is best for ourselves, all life a struggle, to be free of pain and fear, to find our way through the stormy night to some better dawn.
I cried over him the way I did my mother, and before her, my grandmother, knowing that someone special was leaving, someone I would not encounter again on this side of the great divide, and his absence would leave a space in me, a hole in my heart I would carry with me until the last beat and I rejoined him in the world beyond.
A whole day later, I still have the cat carrier rattling around in the back seat of my car, still struck by its emptiness after taking it away with me but leaving Tiny Tug behind, perhaps still carrying its spirit if not its body, now even more firmly gripping my heart with all its claws.
There are some things in this life you don’t know you have until you don’t have them anymore, and yet, maybe still have, buried deep in a place nobody can get at, a treasure so previous no gilt frame could contain it.
I keep reading her poem about the search for reason, like an archaeologist searching through the ruins of the past for clues for today, thinking back to when I thought things had a reason, as if life provides reason for good or bad, right or wrong, as if reason is remotely reasonable when it comes to being human, or even real.
You can grasp it in the palm of your hand, feeling it quiver, filled with expectations of making sense when all it does is stir something up inside you that you can’t control, when in fact is it you trembling and not this other thing we clutch, the vibration, the terrible ache for it never satisfied except maybe when you rock it to sleep, cuddle with it, accepting it as you press against it, and yet even then it remains a stranger, lying beside you in your bed, beyond “reason,” although you imagine you can feel it or taste it, like old wine lingering on the tip of your tongue, possibly elegant, often bitter, but never real, no matter how hard we caress it or seek to mold it, or force ourselves upon it, always more like rubbing against stone, our flesh wearing out long before it does, reasonsremaining unmoved, a cold lover, leaving it up to us to adjust, to turn all this that happens to us into something we need it to be, something we can love with the desperate hope we can make it love us back, trying to seduce reason into making sense, when in the end – as her poem points out – we merely drive ourselves crazy, throwing our bodies against cold stone.
Her latest poem continues a theme of struggle that she began again after her brief moment in her poem about lulls, an continues on about lost opportunities, no longer just an impish little tease, but a serious struggle.
The poem again depicts two separate characters, the speaker who is clearly bitter about the kind of advice those close to her have been giving her and expresses a distinct skepticism about what a person can actually attain through concepts such as hard work and facing down one’s fears.
The poem has two parts, the first stanza repeating the advice she has had to tolerate over the years, from people who are so-called wise, a series of cliches that are supposed to help put a person’s feet firmly on the road to success.
The second stanza challenges those presumptions and paints her world and how it defies those old maxims.
The first part are the typical lectures people get, a peptalk, someone preaching about life, and how she ought to challenge herself, face her fears, and step out from her safe place – needing to take chances in order to advance. After all, the best things, this know-it-all claims, come as a result of struggle.
And she is clearly struggling, even further from that safe place she lingered in during her poem on lulls.
Other people tell her that in order to get ahead, she has to take risks, can’t hide in a bubble, when she is telling them back, no place is safe, and every bit of her life is a struggle to survive. She cannot step out her comfort zone because that place doesn’t exist for her.
Every breath she takes is a challenge.
There is a link between this poem and her last poem about the illusiveness of success, as well as the poem about The Times, which seems hopeful on the surface, but is also full of angst, though told in a voice that is more remote in diction than these later poems are, almost reverent as she goes into that distant holy place where the saints “the great and near great” hang on the gilt walls in gilt frames.
She may have had another reason for using a remote voice in the Times poem, creating distance between her as a writer and the person who must find a way to sell herself, the gilt implying the word “guilt “in this house of the holy, and the ticker tape description that ends with the word “crashed” as if reflecting her crashed career in our office, needing to convince herself that she actually belongs there among the greats.
But this poem and the one about the petulant boy are more direct, the first talking about how illusive success is, something that is taunting and deceptive, while this poem is full of bitterness, about how hard she had worked to get something, and no peptalk no matter how well-intentioned, can make it better, and these people, whomever they are advising her, haven’t a cluse as to what she is going through.
Oddly enough, this poem plays off her one-time familiar advice about living “moment to moment,” only here she is saying each moment is hell.
Facing her fears doesn’t dispel them. She is clearly terrified, unable to breath, in a life and death struggle, and good, bad or best, all she gets from her hard-fought struggle is more grief, or as she put it in an earlier poem, watching what she clawed her way to get escape her grasp.
In a life like this, there is no such thing as a safe place, and her fear echoes previous poems about “locking and unlocking.” She is always looking over her shoulder, waiting for the tap.
This is not a poem aimed at anyone as many of her earlier poems over the summer were. This is a poem about life and reality, and the inability of other people to full grasp the struggle she is undergoing, and how every day is a tussle just to remain alive.
It is always the same, this duality, double meaning, the saying of one thing and meaning another, the injected little tidbits of suggestion, and yet not what they imply at all, or perhaps exactly what intended, but disguised to be denied later if question. I am the crazy man from September, or perhaps I am not, now painted as the impatient fool, and yet maybe not, engaged in what may or may not be a game of cat and mouse, she with her broad whiskers and sharp white teeth poised outside the hole in which I hide for the moment I poke my nose out and firmly find myself in her mouth, devoured perhaps, a hint of a savage game she is far superior than I to play, if real or not, she relying on my inability to resist the cheese laid out before me temptingly before the hole, the irresistible I must resist if I am to survive, far worse last summer when I foolishly took the bait, nearly getting my head chopped as she sat before the falling knife knitting up some new plot, offering hints of forgiveness, spreading nuggets of solace if I would only cease to resist to keep from sinking faster into quick sand of my own desire I recklessly got myself stuck in, we – mice and men – are our own nemesis, perpetually drinking from a cup of poison we know will always deduce us, not nearly as clever as that cat that puts out this temptation for us, always giving ourselves away, never wise enough to simply surrender to the inevitable and to her superior intelligence, all this feeding our egos with this duality that she in her infinite wisdom feeds us, whether a crazy man or the giggling food, a double bind to do this or do that, when either put s up deep into the belly of the cat, outwitted perpetually, having only this dark hole to protect us, as long as we can resist the scent of cheese.
Two months after the last time we’ve had any contact, she apparently is still looking over her shoulder for an ogre that isn’t me.
Although the poem feels as if it is aimed at me or at some other poor fool that has mistakenly flown into her web and has graduated from creepy-crawly to a full-blown stalker.
As in some of her other poems, there seems to be three characters involved, one who is warning another about a third – that illusive stalker-like character who prowls around, but whom the speaker just can’t nail down, a sullen, moody, even cantankerous little boy, who get annoyed for no good reason.
But it is easy to overlook the real meaning of this poem by assuming the obvious and mistaking her metaphor as the essence of the poem, when she means something completely different.
On the surface, the poem seems to depict a stalker, and the speaker cautioning herself against him.
In this aspect, the speaker sounds utterly reasonable, but needs to remind herself that this ill-tempered boy is still somewhere out there, but she is unable to pin down. She can’t catch him at his tricks, and tells herself she needs to look quick, needs to nail him down, someone she won’t be rid of until she does – suggesting that if she does catch him, she needs to buy him a stiff drink.
As with many of her poems, this poem’s tone is set by the use of short, rapid-fire lines, denoting a certain paranoia. The main character sees herself as street smart, someone strutting along, looking around, savvy enough to be aware of who might be pursuing her.
The use of the term “petulant frat boy” sets up a kind of extended metaphor, painting her pursuer as a mischievous urchin, a pest that she doesn’t take too seriously, but is annoyed by.
Images include quick eye movement as if to catch a glimpse in the corner of her eye, and a sense that she is out of breath, perhaps from fleeing or surprise at his constant tapping on her shoulder.
But the real metaphor includes the title which implies he’s a fool and she needs to be patient. He is clever, illusive, but a giggling. fool none the less.
But there is a deeper meaning in all this, which has nothing to do with stalkers or stalking, but with the illusive dreams she just can’t catch up with, fitting somewhat the pattern of her other recent poems. No matter how she tries to catch her lucky star, it always eludes her, and she needs to be patient if she is to fulfill her ambitions.
What she wanted was there a minute ago, she swears.
She tells herself to catch her breath before he taps her on her shoulder again, opportunity knocking, but then fleeing from her, out of reach, almost mocking her efforts.
In some ways, it doesn’t seem real and certainly out of reach, and she seems to feel as if fate is mocking her, teasing her with near misses, tapping her on the shoulder she didn’t look over, a leprechaun promising a pot of gold if she can catch him, only she never can.
The title of her latest posted poem is a play of the old metaphor “food for thought,” and a back handed tribute to French philosopher Rene Descartes, who is perhaps best known for his maxim, “Cogito, Ergo, Sum,” (I think there for I am) – one of the most controversial claims in philosophic history. Many more modern philosophers tend to rephrase it as “I doubt, therefore I am,” meaning if you are consciousness enough to doubt, you have consciousness Still, others in the age of AI believe it is possible to have thought without existence. Many accept that our existence is the only absolute truth, and that doubt is a firm foundation for knowledge.
In this poem, she moves further away from the idea she expressed only a few weeks ago when she talked about lulls in her life, possibly generated by the increase doubt about where her life is headed.
She has returned to the hamster wheel in her head and the parade of “manic ideas” spinning and knocking around in her brain, bashing against the barrier “between my mind and the tips of my fingers, the roof of my mouth.”
Ideas she can’t quite get out, therefore, she is unrewarded, ideas that appear to make sense in her thinking, but which she can’t fully express, ideas endlessly buzzing as she becomes numb.
As with some of her other poems, the speaker is someone trying to understand the inner mysterious process, explain it from the inside out – a logic of a being who by using Descartes as a reference once more places herself at the top of the evolutionary heap, rejecting those limitations of older philosophers for the potential of absolute freedom.
She seems to be searching for some new direction and, like a bee inside a jar, ideas buzz and spin and knock against the barrier that keeps these things from materializing, leaving the tips of her fingers numb as they hover over her computer keyboard, or she can’t even articulate verbally. So many ideas, so many potential directions.
An so she concludes from all these ideas that if she exists, she must be ten different people, or possibly crazy.
This comes at a time when she is looking for a new career. Her life has lived up to the old nursery rime about being everything except maybe a tinker. She’s been a singer, a teacher, a writer, a chef, even a horse back riding instructor and needs to focus on what she might become next, semi-trapped in a political circus amongst a pack of wolves, who would use her, but bring her no closer to becoming someone of significance.
This follows her previous poem about her need to sell herself in order to find her place among the greats and near greats, to convince someone to take a chance on her, to give her an opportunity to prove herself.
Where do you start?
She clearly has a lot of ideas, but no idea of how to express them in a meaningful way, driving herself crazy. After all of her history, she’s already been ten different people, ten different career paths, and for all that experience, she seems not to know how to take the next step.
As noted in this journal from a few days ago, I’ve been inspired to look back at some of her old songs as if they are poetry.
If have, of course, listened to some of these songs thousands of times since she gave me the CD a year ago, only to realize that some the songs posted on some online accounts weren’t on the original CD, and, and in fact, had been recorded much more recently than when the originals were back perhaps in 2005.
These stand out partly because of the difference in production value since the CD music was produced by her husband, a very capable musician in his own right, while a few later pieces she apparently recorded in her apartment, one using a piano she kept in her kitchen, the other using a guitar she apparently received as a gift in late April last year.
The guitar work is simple, using minimal effects, perhaps reverb. But her voice is so powerful, it gives the song its own sense of orchestration as she raises emotions a lesser performer could not manage.
While all of her songs have an amazing haunting quality that carries me along on their emotional roller coaster, the song recorded with guitar in her apartment came at a particularly critical time, just as we were hitting the skids, yet just prior to the real drama that happened later in the month of May.
Like all of her songs – including covers – the real magic is in her voice. So that her husband’s orchestration on the CD enhances only to a certain degree the magic of the music. It is to her voice that I was always drawn, a seductive arrangement that would entice anyone, even people who never met her in person, showing a range and gift for phrasing that is remarkable.
At this point, the guitar piece may well be the last song she recorded (I have no way of knowing if she has posted anything since) and may well be a musical and emotional swan song since it comes at a time when she was on the cusp of change, although still held out hope for the future. A month later, after all the drama (I helped inflict on her), this song might well have been impossible for her, because she could not with the same confidence believe in it.
In some ways it seems to be a throw back to her days following high school when she seemed more like a folk singer than the talented jazz singer she became, although this song is much more complex in music and meaning. It comes at a time when things seem to begin to crumble, and she seems to be looking for answers in the wind, the blowing leaves she sees as being free (when she clearly was not), somehow symbolic of her life.
“But I can feel it, each time they touch men, they touch me even when I’m turned the other way,” she said, going on to say she feels it even when she is sliding, she is still bound to believe – at a time when it is still possible for her to believe.
The song seems to reflect the emotional fog she was then going through when somedays all she saw was a blur in front of her and was forced to be in a state without grace.
This last is a curious phrase that suggests something I don’t know enough about to go into here.
But the song suggests a certain speechlessness, or perhaps helplessness against fate, and yet even then, she feels the sense of potential freedom, the blowing wind, the clinging leaves, touching her, feeding her even when she is sliding – as she appeared to be early last May.
Her voice rises and falls in pitch and volume, suddenly floating well above the music, then falling into almost a whisper, powerful verbal devices that seduce the listener, forcing attention on where she will take us next.
Her voice is clearly full of the grace her lyrics claim she lacks, as she takes us on an emotional ride, going up and down octaves with such ease as we cling to her wings to follow, there is huge power in this vocal vehicle that keeps you clinging, and as she touches themes she would later embrace in her poetry, such as thoughts coming into her head, drawing her out of bed reluctantly, part of that ever problematic early morning conflict she later called hamster thinking, then something small pulls her free, reminds her of the leaves in the trees – and in one passage about their dying, and yet she gets to live another day, again feeling the power of this freedom touch her, feed her.
Again, she refers to facing reality without grace, almost as if a Garden of Eden tale, in which some temptation has severed her from what she wants and needs, and yet as with those Biblical characters, she is still bound to believe.
As pointed out, this song comes before the full fury of the spring and summer, at a time when she still holds out hope for salvation, even though some of her relationships have just gone sour.
Her remarkable vocal talents elicit incredible feelings, not the subtle lust of some of her other songs, but in this case, real passion as if this is an anthem to what is possible, something she might not later be able to recreate. In that moment of time, however, in early May she still clings to hope the way dead leaves cling to tree branches, still feels the touch of wind, feels a sense of what might be possible.
Looking back, this strikes me as her swan song and makes me wonder if she will be able to create on this level again. Listening to it, also makes me feel a bit ashamed for the part I played on dimming the lights on this amazing talent.
We knew this was coming, this move from a building of our own to a cramped little store front down at the other end of town, a panic move by two incompetent owners, who figured out if they sell the wreck of the building, they can stave off shutting down the business – at least for a while.
This may explain why the owner wouldn’t give her a raise – or fired other people even for asking for one, they are squeezing every penny then can from this dying business and don’t want to share what little wealth there is.
The move isn’t the end of the world. I’m still in exile regardless of which place I work out of.
Truth be told the old office is a disaster zone, something left over from another era, leaking pipes, poor heat, worse air conditioning, so it’s frigid in winter, scalding in summer, and dripping like crazy whenever it rains or anybody in the apartments upstairs flushes a toilet.
Yet for some reason, I still like the place, even when I’ve plotted to get out of it, something pleasantly funky about it, and safe, a haven against everything when things got very bad over the last year.
I could always come here, hide in this time warp from the 1970s, and not have to confront the bullshit that went on in the main office except on Tuesdays.
Now, with all of the furniture gone, this place feels like a grave, less safe, one more victim of the strange things that have gone on over the last year.
I can’t help thinking how ancient the place feels, and I old I feel being in it.
It didn’t feel agent when I first snuck in here during the Christmas season a decade ago, after the owners talked me into coming down here to work, the people unaware of the disaster that was about to befall them, the take over they didn’t expect, the betrayal by the previous owner that sold out the business overnight without telling any of the people who worked there.
I snuck in to look around, a spy if not in the house of love, then in a house of good feeling, all of these strange figments of another era working together to get their product out, nothing corporate, just people thrown together for a common cause.
It felt so utterly attractive; I felt so ashamed of coming there in stealth and had the urge to warn them, give them a few weeks in which to abandon ship before it all sank.
But I didn’t. Standing here now, after all that has transpired since, I wish I had.
Seeing it now, abandoned, only made my betrayal seem worse, as if it has taken a decade to finally bury the beast. Without this place, without the people who worked here (most fired or let go except for the three people moving to the new office with me), the institution that once was, will never be again, regardless of how much we pretend.
During the worst of the last year, during those times when I felt most exiled here, I often imagined somehow taking back this place from the two owners who owned it and turning it back to what it was before – impossible then, now even less possible, having gutted it like a fish.
I thought things would get better when she resigned, somehow things would go back to what they had been in that period after the takeover. But now, I realize nothing will be the same again, and that this is only the beginning of the end.
Perhaps fate has been kind to her by forcing her to resign when she did, not witnessing this slow death the rest of us must endure.
Dickens said it best when he said it was the best of times and the worst of times.
This being the 40th anniversary of the worst and most painful year of my life, until now.
Although comparing this year to that year doesn’t quite work either, I was young and foolish then, just back from three years on the run from the police, a confused boy with almost no notion of where I was going only where I had been.
I saw my wife take off with my daughter who I’d not see again (except for one night) for another decade.
Forty years later, I should have been wiser, but I’m not.
I never felt so lost as I did then, the chill of Thanksgiving coming upon me with the threat of winter, dead leaves still clinging to the trees. I always loved autumn, yet always felt its sting when the last of the leaves fell, before the snow, bare limbs exposed.
I thought I would never feel so lost again as I did then. This year came close, and I’m grateful finally to see the year end.
I ache inside the way I did back then, knowing as the end of the year approaches, as the empty holidays come and go, nothing has been resolved.
I’m full of secrets I dare not tell anybody about, while at the same time, for all I know I really know nothing, what actually transpired over the last year, whether it was intentional or accidental, whether or not I’ve been run over by somebody else’s agenda, or I have run over myself.
Even the people I thought I could trust, I’m doubtful about, such as the Small Man and his crew, and even people in my own office.
I’m not sure about her either, whether she is a shark swimming with sharks, or a guppy pretending to be a shark. I have less doubts around the gang of thieves around her, the twisted greedy little people who have carved a place on their own in the Virgin Mayor’s camp, but willing to betray him the moment he ceases to provide them with cover for their greed.
This is the time of year when we’re supposed to express what we’re thankful for, and the best I can come up with is that I survived.
The operative line in the poem she posted today is about selling yourself, “as we all do, as best we can.”
A startling comment inserted deep into the body, something utterly obvious, yet surprising at the same time.
This is not a new concept for her, since she has spent a life time selling herself well enough to get in the front door.
But in this case, she may have overstepped a little, seeking to graduate from our pissant little world into perhaps the most prestigious publication in the world.
After all of her boasting about our office being a stepping stone, her applying for a job at The New York Times should not have come as a surprise.
The poem depicts her journey to The New York Times building, although the opening details the largely defunct former Times headquarters at One Times Square, taken over by numerous corporate entities after the Times abandoned it, only for it become a largely vacant shell of what it had once been, the exterior turned into a billboard magnet and an on-and-off ticket tape display after the Times moved its offices down the street from it, recently constructing a palace on 8th Avenue directly across the street from the Port Authority building.
She walked straight in, passed the ticket tape and advertising for turkey into the iconic building of her “childhood scribbled dreams,” with all the great and near grate in gilt frame on gilt walls.
This is not a depiction of the interior of One Times Square I recall from my visits there during that brief stint when Newsday occupied the premises but may well reflect The New York Times palace I’ve seen only from the outside or in published photographs.
But she describes walking beneath the giant Christmas wreath, which is typically hung over the front door of the palace on 8th Avenue, up a golden escalator to a room on the 13th floor where people go to wait and “to think before to sell yourself in a short time, as we all do as best, we can.”
This implies an interview in which she had to make her case as to why she thought she deserved a place in the most prestigious of publications.
She hears the sound of “the best of the best” working elsewhere in the building around her, and hears in her head “I belong here,” ringing strongly and calmly above it all.
No doubt, someone encouraged her to apply, most likely our former temporary boss, who likely promised to serve as her reference if she did. While she had no journalism degree, she had graduated from one of the most prestigious universities in New York, and her writing is as good perhaps better than much of what appears each day in that newspaper. Indeed, others from our petty little world had made the transition to the Times before her, so, why not her?
This pending interview may explain her last poem about a temporary lull, and how she did not see her new found position in the city as a place she would eventually end up permanently. She did tell The Small Man (and others) that she had big plans, something the office gossip repeated to me.
The central question of the poem is whether or not she can sell herself well enough to get her foot in the door.
The poem has a subtext that may or may not be intentional, negative words giving a negative connotation, such as the use of “Crashed” when referring to the ticker tape report, and the repeated word “gilt” which might well be taken for “guilt,” and the sense that deep down she may not believe she deserves this opportunity, and envisions an eventual crash. The use of 13th floor in a city where many of the buildings deliberately exclude them as bad luck also suggest some level of inner doubt. Although at one point, she questions why she does not have the usual doubts, and the nervousness, and questions why she isn’t telling herself “You don’t belong here,” after years of being undersold and underpaid.
On the surface of the poem, she implies confidence the subtext denies, as she tells herself that she doesn’t belong there. But it is an unconvincing argument that the underlying negative tone negates.
She might well be talented enough to work there, and yet, there seems to be something that holds her back, the “gilt” frames in which her picture will never appear, and the gilt walls she may only get to see once.
By this, I don’t mean her any ill luck. I sincerely hope the Times hires her. All the doubt is in the context of the poem, even when she asks herself why it isn’t there, when by asking, she implies that the doubt is there after all.
Word is on the street that she’s been making calls around the county looking for dirt on the Virgin Mayor’s political enemies.
And it may not be RR that’s pulling her strings – or at least not him alone.
You have to wonder if maybe she feels a little trapped. I always got the feeling that she uses her poetry to say things she can’t otherwise openly say even to herself, perhaps assuming that those like RR and perhaps the others wouldn’t catch on.
Perhaps she assumes that some people might be clever enough to read between the lines of her poetry, even someone she has come to hate such as me.
How she came to be where she is at this point and who she is answerable to remains a mystery to me.
I’m not sure which side she is on, paid by the same people who pay the Private Eye to keep tabs on the Virgin Mayor perhaps? Or is she as loyal to him as she claims – with the brief blip on the radar when she sided with RR against the Virgin Mayor.
Or is she completely out of her league politically, and is simply treading water until she finds somewhere else to land?
I don’t even trust the Small Man, who was instrumental in forcing her to resign from our company.
In a political landscape where the Virgin Mayor is largely on his own, even the Small Man seems devious, and his intentions suspect.
I thought he was being kind to her by allowing her to resign and not tell the owners what she was up to.
But now I’m uncertain and wonder what else got discussed in that conversation besides him asking her to do the right thing.
She is now part of a pack of wolves that are loyal to the Virgin Mayor as long as they can get what they want using his name.
Do they control her or is she still a relatively free agent, buying time until she can find a gig without all of the handlers?
Is she still tied to RR as she was early in September, and is he still plotting against the Virgin Mayor while pretending to be his friend?
I am struck by several conflicting images of her from over the last year, all of them bearing one common element – that she is isolated, especially now, even though she is part of that crowd.
The only people she seems to completely trust are members of her family, and seems closest to her brother, even though she is jealous about how he makes his money.
So, we come back to this idea of communication, and how she seems to use her poetry to say things she can’t say outright. I’m struck by some of the contradictions over the summer, between her public hostility towards me, and yet some poems that seem to offer more sympathetic advice, such as the quick sand poem and the one about compassion, and other poems she’s posted like the one about trickling up, she later took down possibly because it seemed to admit something she didn’t want exposed, even with the tag line of “get it?”
I don’t know what all of it means.
Perhaps her poetry is a call for help, a message in bottle, something she is casting out into the waves for anybody clever enough to get, needing someone to understand things she can’t overtly say in a world where people use the least weakness as a weapon against you.
The Private Eye grew up with the Neighboring Mayor, kids from the same hood, who did everything together, legal and illegal, best of friends through the rough years, including the Neighboring Mayor’s rise to power.
The Private Eye was in the Neighboring Mayor’s inner circle, along with another hood buddy named Woodchuck Phil, who were privy to all the mayor’s dirty little secrets, helping him to get and keep power.
The three of them made a tight little circle into which nobody else was welcome.
The mayor loved the private detective, but merely felt sorry for Phil, yet kept both of them close – perhaps, too close.
Not everybody felt comfortable around Phil or dealing with the mayor while Phil was around.
Phil was bossy and tended to take over things when the mayor was not around, and insisting people go through him to get to the mayor.
As loyal as Phil was, he alienated some of the other mayor’s key people, many of whom urged the mayor to sever ties with him. Phil tended to push himself into every conversation and sometimes edged otherwise loyal people out.
Phil served a number of low-level roles, such body guard and driver, but because the mayor loved him, he tolerated some of Phil’s misbehavior, hoping the steady jobs would keep Phil out of serious trouble.
The mayor even kept Phil around when Phil became the target of political propaganda, as the mayor’s enemies pointed out Phil’s violent past and drug conviction.
This is some of the stuff the Private Detective fed us later, hoping our boss and our writer would use Phil to get at the mayor. RR also apparently wanted her to pursue some of this.
Phil was straight out of the first Godfather movie, a dim but loyal soldier who liked the fact that he had someone like the mayor to protect. He was a chain-smoking tough guy whose temper often got him into scrapes, even among some of the mayor’s other loyalists.
For a time, Phil got along with another tough guy, Hector, who did most of the money work, but many other of the mayor’s crowd didn’t trust – mostly because Hector did business with the State Senator which everybody saw as the mayor’s sworn enemy. some believe the Senator eventually bought Hector off with a job in the county sheriff’s department – as the Senator managed to do with many of the others disillusioned with the mayor or Phil.
Hector became the Private Eye’s chief sources of information about what went on in the mayor’s inner circle and felt confident Hector would eventually become the instrument by which the Private Eye (and his employer the Senator) could eventually bring the mayor down.
If there was corruption to be found, the Private Eye was convinced Hector would lead him to it.
“Phil was always with the mayor and the mayor used Phil to send messages,” said the PR person for the congressman, claiming that the mayor frequently used Phil to lean on people got get political contributions.
Others on the county level believe the mayor is basically honest, and that Phil frequently acted on his own.
“The mayor doesn’t tolerate corruption among his people,” another political consultant told me and claimed Phil operated as a free agent, doing things in the mayor’s name that the mayor did not know about, sometimes well-meaning, other times with his own agenda, leaning on business people for bribes that may or may not eventually made their way to the mayor’s charity.
As pointed out earlier, the Private Eye’s falling out with the mayor came when the mayor picked someone else to become police chief instead of appointing the Private Eye.
A very competent investigator, the Private Eye had used his skills and his friendship with the mayor to rise rapidly through the police ranks without taking any of the required testing, a fact that made him more than a few enemies among the rank and file in the department. What he wanted most was to become the police chief and fully expected the mayor to get that for him – at which point he ran into a road block when the police chief he hoped to replace was a black man, and this black chief went to the NAACP to block being replaced.
The mayor tried to appease the Private Eye by appointing him deputy chief and even gave him a separate office in the Department of Public Works so as to be out from the scrutiny of the black police chief and gave the Private Eye a salary that was the highest in the state for that position.
It was not enough.
The Private Eye opened a private investigation agency and focused his whole attention in bringing down the black police chief and on getting his vengeance on the mayor.
It was not difficult to bring down the police chief, since he was moonlighting full time as the head of a corporate security firm and could not explain how he could be doing both jobs full time.
The mayor, rather than firing the chief, allowed him to retire – with an outrageous pension, the Private Eye brought out.
Around this time, she started to cover the scene for our office, although it was our boss who broke the story a month earlier (with information fed to her by the Private Eye).
But it was she (our writer) who followed up with a serious of stories that made the Private Eye look like an avenging angel and continued to get information from him to continue the attacks on the mayor for most of the following year.
Both RR and the Private Eye both used her for their own ends, feeding her enough information to satisfy their personal agendas.
Then, Phil got caught by the feds taking a bribe from a local auto dealer, which the auto dealer had tape recorded, and then took the tape to the feds.
The Private Eye knows about the tape and is desperate to use it to try and connect the mayor to it.
But two events occurred. The Feds took Phil into a witness protection program, and she quit her job with us, leaving him only access to our boss, who for some reason isn’t willing to run with the story without a lot more documentation.
The indictment when it finally came down didn’t even mention Phil by name – although the feds did raid city hall, removing a number of records with which Phil was associated.
I met the neighboring mayor at the diner where he expressed his continued distrust for our office, especially our boss, not the writer who had left to become personal aide to the Virgin Mayor.
“She was only doing what your boss told her to do,” the neighboring mayor told me. “And your boss is getting her directions from (the Private Eye), who hates me because I couldn’t make his police chief.”
The Neighboring Mayor had been under pressure to pick a black police chief. The Private Eye had been deputy chief, but didn’t have the qualifications to become chief, even if he’d been black. Paid by the Senator to find dirt on the Neighboring Mayor, the Private Eye eventually found enough dirt to bring down the Black Police Chief but could only find petty stuff on the Neighboring Mayor – but not for want of trying, using our office and the local Web Man to do so.
The Neighboring Mayor might have felt different about her had he heard all the horrible stuff she had said about him in our staff meetings, calling him corrupt and saying he had a love child stashed in one of the housing authority buildings, an underage girl, none of which she could prove, but most likely part of the talk that went on with RR and his cohorts in the neighboring town.
When I raised concerns about such statements, she ceased bringing up these ideas at the staff meetings and met with the owner privately to discuss them.
Now, however, with her moving on, she seemed of no more concern about her. Rumors, however, suggested that the clan led by Joey D had her calling around the county looking for dirt on the Virgin Mayor’s political enemies, and perhaps even expounding on the dirt she’d already dug up about the Neighboring Mayor.
I asked the Neighboring Mayor if he had concerns about RR being named deputy mayor under the Virgin Mayor.
He really didn’t answer the question, which I took as yes, but a qualified yes, as part of a payoff to RR to keep him quiet, I thought.
At some point, the truth has to come out, because any conspiracy involving more than two people means someone will talk.
The problem is, how do I know who is telling the truth, if anybody?
Sometimes they are all lying, although someone may feel the need to blurt out the details which gives everybody away.
This is partly what happened last night in an email exchange with the private eye going after the neighboring mayor, and his reaction to posts made on a video by one of the northern county web news reporters.
He didn’t like my questioning the newly created jobs by the Virgin Mayor. Some of the lesser people in the administration were angry at the jobs because they hadn’t gotten the raises they had created.
The jobs in question, of course, went to her and RR, and some long-time loyalist to the Virgin Mayor feel a little put out.
But the Private Eye was upset when I asked whether or not these attacks on the Virgin Mayor were being prompted by the State Senator rumored to be funding a lot of the Private Eye’s work against the neighboring mayor.
The Neighboring Mayor – while a little put out by some of the Virgin Mayor’s activities – still supported him politically.
The Private Eye – who hates the Neighboring Mayor – clearly doesn’t like his meal ticket being dragged into the mess.
I told the Private Eye that the web reporter had gone against the Virgin Mayor because he got a big pay off from the State Senator, and this set the Private Eye off, since the same bag man who apparently funnels him funds from the State Senator is also funneling funds to the Web Guy, a little too close an accusation since the same thing can be said about the Private Eye – since none of this political sabotage appeared anywhere on the state ELEC reports.
The Neighboring Mayor knows much of this, and how the State Senator used the Private Eye to feed us negative stories about him, some of which turned out to have some truth to them.
Even with her gone from our office, the Neighboring Mayor is still apparently uncomfortable with us, and with the fact that two of his enemies have been given high profile positions with his ally, the Virgin Mayor.
He just doesn’t know who to trust, and now, watching the Web Guy change sides has made matters worse.
Workers for the State Senator have pulled nasty tricks before, such as the time in the 1980s when they hired a prostitute to seduce one of their enemies, and then blackmailed the man, who committed suicide as a result.
In another incident, they hired a prostitute to seduce a school guard in order to force him to quick in order to give the job to a cop that was more loyal to their team.
The sales pitch the State Senator’s crew is promoting these days is that the Neighboring Mayor is corrupt, and they are using every means possible to push that theme.
“How can he be corrupt?” the Neighboring Mayor’s Chief of Staff asked when I raised the issue with him. “He lives in a two-bedroom flat and doesn’t have a lot of money in his pocket.”
Yet, I knew the Neighboring Mayor had crossed the line from time to time and that the Private Eye knew it as well and had a tiger by the tail trying to prove it.
Maybe that’s why the Neighboring Mayor went along with her and RR’s appointment to the jobs close to the Virgin Mayor, buying off two potential threats.
It’s how everything works in this neck of the woods.
