The poem she posted today about game playing largely speaks for itself, less densely packed with obscure references than the poem she posted from 2003, yet it feels oddly connected, as if she is once again sending a message to someone for a particular purpose I can’t completely ascertain.
The poem depicts her frustration with the rules of love and relationships. In it, she outlines her pet peeves and why she will likely spend her life alone.
It almost seems like a declaration of independence, and yet says a lot more when taken in context of the last half dozen poems which deal with close relationships, bad advice and undependable people she has allowed into her life.
The poem highlights how ludicrous rules of dating seem to her, and how they seem to get into the way of legitimate romance.
It is difficult from the poem to tell just whom it is directed towards, if anyone. Possibly it is just frustration with some romance that has gotten bogged down in ritual. It sounds as if some new intended romance has gone sour and she is trying to pin the blame to all those artificial social devices people attach to the process of finding love.
She clearly has no use for the cultural contraptions people adopts when meeting and being with other people. There is mockery in this poem, but little humor, when she could have easily turned the poem into brilliant satire. Instead, she paints these things as sad and counterproductive.
This is one of her longer poems, told in seven lengthy stanzas, depicting customs she finds irritating.
She opens the poem with the classic old-school ritual of just who should hold the door open for whom, and the giving of chocolates which she hates, something I mistakenly gave her on the horrible night last May when I abandoned her at the bar, proving just how little I knew about her likes and dislikes, depending on ritual to street my way. Luckily, I never tried to give her roses – which she also hates.
She also complains about needing to count the number of times you see someone before revealing the “essential pieces of yourself,” so as not to push someone away, or as a test of their reaction before going on to reveal even more.
“All seems a bunch of crap to me,” she says. “Or not calling someone when you want to call. So, you text instead, waiting out the other to win the upper hand of order in order to ensure you have done the proper dance to protect yourself.”
So, if the other people give up on your or proves disappointing, you can tell yourself you took all the proper steps.
“Seems awfully flat and cold to me,” she says.
These things, she claims, do little to make for true love, and to her thinking, it is all part of a fairy tale she does not subscribe to. She, instead, has fashioned a fairy tale to her own liking.
Words like “test,” “protect,” and other stuff nonsense have no place in “the lexicon of life and friendship,” she says.
In fact, she is confounded as to why people use the same process to train pets or children on adults, introducing each other to rules, “reward and consequence” when all adults want is to seek some solace from other adults.
Game playing exhausts her, she said, since she is “of an ilk that does not naturally play these games at all.”
If love is a game that must be one or placed with such calculation as to sustain it, then “it’s time, I think, to try and consider a life alone,” she says, or at lease, “to learn to love myself.
Her instincts tell her to avoid play that doesn’t “feel like play at all.”
She wants, “no games, no unclear and stagnant ritual. No stupid dancing around the beauty of the truth.”
As said earlier in this, it is impossible for me to determine what inspired this. And yet, t is poem fits into the pattern of the last few poems she’s posted, even the one from 2003 in which she expresses dissatisfaction with the usual routines, whether it be advice on how to succeed or how she ought to live her life, or how to find true love.
To put it mildly, she is not a happy camper.
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