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.
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