Written late February 2013
So, from her poetry posts, she seems to be in love or at least, heavy lust.
Saturday, December 31, 2022
The mythical married man
Friday, December 30, 2022
A photographic career February 22, 2013
Just when I thought things had calm down, they get weird again.
She started a few Facebook page with a photo spread our owner had been bugging me to get for over two weeks.
I don’t really know what it means except to suggest that he (our owner) and she are still in contact on some level and may explain why he continues to build a case against me – perhaps with the ultimate aim of getting me fired.
He’s been bitching about the quality of our company website, and suddenly decided to make it photo intensive.
He comes to our staff meetings and complains about how horrible the photos are, picking on individuals, and how unprofessional it looks for our staff to be using cellphones to take pictures when other media has people taking pictures with cameras.
Again, I get the feeling that someone is pumping him up, perhaps again with the idea of hiring someone to act as a staff photographer, a position we have not had since we started using digital photography.
I can’t help but wonder if this is somehow tied into her and her role as the official photographer for the Virgin Mayor. Is this a way our owner can justify bringing her back (God knows why she would want to if the pay is just as shitty as it was before).
This is pure speculation. I have no concrete evidence that the owner plans such a move or that she is being considered for the position even if he is.
Yet the fact that she started a new Facebook page dedicated solely to her photography and her art is suspicious coming on the heals of our owners ranting about needing better pictures.
The fact that she posted a photo series there that the owner has been pushing me to get furthers these suspicions.
The fact that she came down to my town to do the spread also bothers me, a kind of dig in the ribs to say she can do what she wants whenever she wants and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I would think she would be happy where she is if not for some of the posts about people putting her through hell so she can help them get to heaven.
Even if she’s angry at them doesn’t mean she’s any less enraged at me.
In her thinking, I may well be a perpetual threat, someone she can rely on to remain an enemy, a scapegoat she can blame for all of her troubles.
My posting a poem about many artists never seeing fame in their lifetimes may have seemed like a provocation, when it was merely an observation.
It is possible she doesn’t pay attention to what I post these days, although the photo spread she posted from my town suggests otherwise, especially because the owner has been pushing me to do it.
I argued with the owner, my boss and the salesman J to get her permission to use those photos for our site, since they were as good and possibly better than anything I could have done.
The owner got very strange over this, as if he didn’t actually expect me to notice her work let alone mention it to him, perhaps uncomfortable with the fact he seemed to know about her pictures before she posted them.
He ordered me to go take my own pictures and then left in a huff.
Thursday, December 29, 2022
A leap into the fire February 21, 2013
The poem she posted yesterday picks up right where her previous poem left off, only taking her argument as to why she should get involved with a married man one step further.
Even if the poem is a reposting from the past, she clearly is sending out a message with it, and making her arguments current. So, in this narrative, I will treat the poem as if she just penned it and tie it into the themes she has been promoting with other recently posted poems.
This is no longer the ethical argument she made when asking herself if she should maintain a platonic relationship with a man she clearly lusts after, but instead it poses the question as to what she should do next – knowing full well the consequences.
“How should I proceed from what I am unable to define?” she asks.
She is still uncertain as to how she got in this predicament, how it happened, if indeed what it is that has happened. Is it even real except in her imagination? Is it real “since it doesn’t exist anywhere but in my mind, she says, raising the same issue her previous poem raised of “a love affair of the mind.”
This sudden plunge into a hormonal black hole apparently came from “a few breathless close encounters of a maddening kind,” suggestive enough of possibility as to inspire frustration in her heart.
This, she says, is not a typical affair, destined to peak and eventually sputter out, but something else, she thinks, something different from what she has previously encountered.
She is fixated on one particular short night, a night seemingly innocent, like a teenage romance, fumbling and bumbling with perhaps too much respect and sweetness, which made it all the more attractive to her, “more curious and the more impossible to define.”
She is very uncertain and certainly scared.
She is caught in an odd dilemma where when she sees him, she is instantly becalmed or as she puts it her “will is soothed,” and yet at the same time it stirs up passion in her, and she is desperate to take the next step, even though she is full of doubts, perhaps even guilt.
“How do you pursue a thing you know might destroy the life of who you care so much for?” she asks, again bring things back to the previous poem where she debated whether or not to take him to bed.
He is obviously married and if she takes the issue to its natural conclusion – to lay claim to his heart as well as his body and take her place on the throne currently occupied by his wife, his old life will be altered forever, and she will be to blame.
“Though,” she points out, “in the end the burden will be borne by two,” meaning him and her.
At the moment, her desire for him is still unexpressed (although part of the purpose of posting the poem may well be to put him on notice about her desires), a private agony or as she put it in her previous poem, something that still remains in her head.
Her struggle, however, is less about whether to do it or not, to keep her passion to herself of engage him, but how to go about giving into her desire. While in her previous poem, she still struggled, this poem makes it clear she’s made up her mind to plunge ahead or perhaps more accurately, she is unable to resist the overwhelming urge.
“I wish I had the power to comply with what I thought was right and true,” she says, by which she means she cannot stop herself from destroying his marriage; she is too consumed with her desire for him.
“All that I want, all that I see, all that I hear is you.”
This is an amazing love poem, far superior to those she emailed me a year ago. This poem is so full of angst, it is difficult not to sympathize with her, anxiety over the fact that she knows what the right thing to do is but cannot comply with because her desire for him is so overwhelming.
Even though the poem asks what she should do next, she clearly has already made up her mind to do it., changing both of their lives, making it impossible for either of them to go back to the safe places their lives occupied before.
What makes this poem great is the fact that is raises fundamental questions about human nature. Life is infinitely more complex than right or wrong.
While we assume we have control over our lives, passion often causes us to leap into the fire with eyes closed, never fully cognizant we might get burned.
To seduce him or not is not the question here; she has already made up her mind.
The question is how do they live with the consequences.
This is not a typical love affair that comes and goes with but a brief moment of anguish.
This man means more than just another roll in the hay.
Unsaid here is the potential down the road that he might come to despise her for this even though she clearly points out the burden of guilt rests on both their shoulders.
To leap into the fire or not. She is clearly already there. We don’t know from this poem whether or not he is as well.
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
Flesh on flesh February 20, 2013
If read too superficially, you might think from her latest
poem, she intended to become a nun – which would be a gross misinterpretation
since the opposite seems to be true.
On one hand, you could also misread the poem into thinking
she is attempting to seduce someone into an affair, making an argument not so
much different from Shakespeare, who argued best to give up one’s virginity since
the worms will devour it eventually anyway.
This would be a mistaken interpretation, too, although the poem
is definitely about her attraction to someone that has gone unrequited, but it
is not because this other person is resisting her charms.
It is difficult to know who the poem is about, although it
is clear she has found someone she is attracted to, and she is debating whether
to pursue it to its next “natural” conclusion.
The poem is a debate within herself, about whether she
should pursue someone she is attracted to, who is like married, but who has become
a kindred spirit.
Does she take the affair to the next logical level or keep
it as a love affair in her mind.
She is struggling with her own lust, and the urge to strip
the whole thing of its spiritual trapping and get down and dirty, a relationship, which “begs to un-transmogrify into
run of the mill evolutionary forms,” to engage in something that is “best
shared naked,” a natural progress most would assume, though she admits “something
about flesh on flesh means death to the original lust.”
She wonders if doing the nasty need will ruin something that
is special, when if she keeps it contained, she might maintain her lust as
something saintly (she refusing to disrupt someone else’s life) into something
sinful if she does, “transformed from sin to saintly if styed safety in the
head and out of the bed.”
Her sinful side might remain aloof, saintly, but she can’t stop
thinking about it.
“It lives on there, protected, kind, unrejected, and blind.”
Yet like Shakespeare, she seems to understand that a platonic
relationship is unnatural and can’t possibly survive in the real world. At
best, someone can keep it locked away, never acted on, also never betrayed or a
cause of disappointment by real people in the real world.
She calls it “a love affair of the mind” or kindred spirits,
which may become diminished into base lust. But she seems to argue that it is
the way of things, flesh on flesh, which may ruin the original appeal, “death
to the original lust,” she writes.
Although she may mean Shakespeare’s meaning here, in which
death equals orgasm.
She appears to be scared she might spoil something special
if she takes it to the next and natural level. He might even reject her. And if
there is another woman involved, a wife, then she would be “kind” by showing
restraint.
The poem seems to suggest the folly of and self-deception in
believing you can lust for someone and not act on it, and thus keeps love pure,
when love making itself is an animal act, sweaty and full of animal passion,
hardly the ethereal stuff poets sometimes make it out to be.
Lust can’t be made pure by holding back, lust is lust, sex
is sex, and you can drive yourself crazy by keeping in your head rather than
taking it to be.
Yet part of her, at least, wants to do the right thing, only
you can feel the other part of her winning the argument, perhaps echoing Shakespeare’s
take on the folly of purity, about maintaining virtue until the worms get it
after death.
As run of the mill and common as sex might seem, maybe even
a little unpoetic, it is the natural result of lust.
She being the educated poet that she is, may well be
alluding to Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” in using the term “a love affair
of the mind,” which in Mann’s work means love not acted on leads to decay and death.
The poem implies an extramarital relationship which she
might put at risk if she goes to bed with him.
And it seems pretty clear, she doesn’t believe they can
remain friends, kindred spirits, nor is she certain she can keep the beast
locked up in her head anyway.
She does not seem to believe that a platonic relationship
can survive, there is a natural progression lust always brings, and ultimately spiritual
love needs to be demystified and to surrender to the sweaty reality of flesh on
flesh.
She seems to be saying lust is natural and so is its
eventual resolution in sex. What’s not natural is pretending you can keep lust
contained in your head and not acted upon.
Back to that? February 20, 2013
It appears that the poem she posted first on her Facebook page and later on her blog may not be new at all, but something she dug out of her archive – invalidating many of the assumptions I made in my previous journal entry.
But she is clearly sending a message, wanting someone in her close circle of friends to read it, although it is impossible to tell just who she intended.
If it is an old poem as she indicated when posting it on her Facebook page, then she continues to struggle with the same issues as she has in the past, perhaps with another married man, but is posting the poem now to communicate the same message she needed to express back then, how she got drawn in, and how she lost herself in the process, and how perhaps she deceives herself.
This poem seems much more direct than some of her more cryptic ones.
As pointed in my other journal entry, she’s scared to pursue a course of action that could destroy the life of the person she is attracted to. She sees it as her choice to make, but the consequences will be shouldered by both of them.
The poem opens with her pondering what she should do next, and to figure out just when all of it started, and to try to define what “it” is in the first place – an affair, a fling, a romance or perhaps even true love.
But she clearly does not see this as a typical affair.
She is possessed by that all too short a night, innocent fumbling “of sweetness and force” that makes it much more difficult to define what it is.
What she means by “force” is beyond me, since she also said it is innocent, the teenage sort, and full of “over respect.”
In other words, he was too much of a gentleman which only make her all the more curious.
And yet, if she pursues it, pushes this to become something more intense, she risks destroying his life (as pointed out in the previous journal entry – his marriage). She knows the choice is not hers alone and yet, she feels powerless to do what she knows is right and true when she clearly wants this person.
Taken in context with other people she has recently posted, this poem is apparently sending a message to someone, perhaps encouraging him to make the first move and stop being overly respectful.
The fact that the poem comes out of her archive says she’s been here before, and you have to wonder what the outcome was the last time.
The real self? February 18, 2013
(This is my first attempt at analyzing this poem – which I don’t think is as accurate as my second attempt)
She talks about who she is or was or should be, trying to step back in time, perhaps, to evaluate where she has been and where, perhaps, she might be going.
There is something in the flavor in this poem of her 2003 poem about altered priorities.
She is wiser now than she once was, street wise, though seeming to know that the person involved in “the game” is not who she really is either.
She seems to want to get back to the person she was, but can only get glimpses of it, that person possibly that she was before she got sucked into the game so long ago.
This is a moment of reflection, looking at herself in the mirror, not to determine if she is the most beautiful or most powerful, but rather, what she actually is, who is this person she sees looking back at her, and why is this person so different from the person she thought she would become.
She has been through all this before and will likely go through it again.
But these moments come only when she is stable enough, “a chance to balance.” A time when she is not teetering in one direction or another or reacting to some stimulus that has put her into a state that is too hectic or unstable for reflection.
She is a woman of many masks, and she has been putting them on and taking them off for so long she seems to have lost herself, accepting the masks that hide her inner self from the world without as who she really is, when they aren’t her at all, yet she has to live with the consequences of their actions, those things she’s had to do in order to project strength, needing to act out the role each mask dictates, as if in a Greek tragedy, she playing role of hero and villain, seductress and seduced, the apprentist or the mentor, though none of those are who she really is either.
None of this is new. She seems to be living her own version of Ground Hog Day, repeating the same routines over and over, if not quite exactly, “the same all the same” as she puts it, as if nothing has or will fundamentally change, and she might as well throw herself back into the game again, even if she doesn’t know who she is, even if she really doesn’t care anymore.
This poem suggests that she isn’t going to change, and perhaps wouldn’t know how to change if it was possible.
She seems to be looking back at a time when she thought she had a better handle on her life, nostalgic for that person who may have been her real self.
This is a very sad poem about a woman who has lost herself in herself and has no clue as to how to get back, how to find herself among all those mirror images, all those superficial masks she had put on to protect her inner, her real self, and now she can’t tell which is which.
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
Getting back in the game February 18, 2013
In reading her latest posted poem, an old Billy Joel lyric flashed through my brain from Scenes from an Italian Restaurant: “They’ll find a way to get by” which is what the poem suggest she will, too.
The self-doubt, the introspection, the sometimes near panic contained in the poems she’s posted over the last few months still clings to this poem as well – perhaps more so as she searched for identity, who she is, who she was and who she once thought she would be.
And somehow, this retrospective allows her to refocus, and to – as she puts it – get back into the game.
She seems to understand the need to be in the game, even when she is not always treated fairly, and often comes out on the losing side.
Not to be in it is not to exist.
And her whole life going back as far as she can remember is about survival – if not of the fittest then of the most cunning, and when need be, the most ruthless.
As she points out in the poem, this is not the first time she has gotten the “chance to balance,” what she would and would not do at herself, if indeed, she could determine who exactly self was.
She still doesn’t know who she meant that to be, although when she gets to the point of being that person, it’ll be all right, a kind of balance.
She says it is brand new while at the same time very old. She seems to see herself from outside herself, flying back into the game, not completely sure how it will all end up, but not caring either.
The poem is about rediscovering herself after having been diverted from a vision she had of herself at some more positive time in the past, after years of other people apparently trying to define her, her history full of other people who desire to shape her into someone they want rather than who she thinks she is, and in this mix, even she seems to have lost herself.
Again, we get a speaker examining herself in an internal monologue, trying to make sense of what has happened to her, and what she needs to get back on track.
She questions what she would do “as herself,” implying as in some of her other poems that she has listened too long to the ill-advice of others around her.
But in order to understand what she would do, she has to determine who she is or was or wanted/wants to be, even though as she puts it, “You still don’t know who you meant that to be.”
The subtext is that nobody has a right to define who you are except you. Yet other people have the ability to confuse you, make you doubt yourself, until you doubt who you are and what you ought to be.
She seems to be the audience this poem is written for, yet as with all her poems, she appears to want to provide a glimpse of her thinking and her mood for anyone astute enough to make sense of it all.
She is clearly telling the world that she is coming back, no longer caring about what other people think –since nobody appears to know who she really is in the first place.
After months of mopping and worrying, she has finally thrown her hands up saying, “what the fuck” and getting on with her life. To hell with what other people think.
She is clearly going to do what she needs to do, as she has always done, to survive.
All this comes at a time when the career she thought she would pursue as a writer evaporated before her eyes, and all the quality work she engaged in wasted.
She wound up in a job far below her skill set and for less significant than she deserves.
The poem is partly about figuring out what exactly she needs to do next.
The details of what has transpired in this less career remain a mystery, yet there is a sense that she has been disrespected to the point perhaps that she began to question her own worth.
This poem comes across as a document of liberation, casting away doubt, and forcing herself back onto her feet like a boxer who had been knocked down, but not knocked out.
There is at the start of the poem a mood of hope, a sense of finding momentum again after a moment of reflection. She has been here before. She knows what to do, and so must do it again.
There is a tone of true grit in all this, no longer playing the role of good soldier as she as in the past, yet still shouldering the boulder as her old self to push it back up the hill, even if the effort is pointless, even if -- as gods before her have discovered – the boulder rolls down the other side.
This is who she is.
Monday, December 26, 2022
Chronicler of fate February 19, 2913
As the official photographic chronicler of the fund raiser, she did not appear in any of the photos she took, yet managed to isolate and identify all of the important people behind the scenes, an important gift she’ll never realize she game me.
The irony, of course, is that other people took pictures of her taking pictures, exposing her as a behind the scenes player as well – a role I suspect she might actually like.
It is impossible from the photographs to tell if these movers and shakers actually take her seriously or dismiss her as glorified secretary, someone the Virgin Mayor hired out of pity.
Her poetry suggests she has little or no power, and equally little respect. Ironically, she had more power while outside the administration while working for us than she has now.
How long she will tolerate her unimportant role remains to be seen. She is not someone who likes being made to feel small. Even when she plays the role of needing to be mentored, she has her eye on the prize.
A lot has to do with the Virgin Mayor’s legal fate. The Freeholder believes we will likely know by June. But the Virgin Mayor’s legal team is doing its best to stall, possibly with the ultimate motive of keeping their hands in the till as long as possible, getting their contracts with the city before the golden goose gets cooked.
A lot of the case depends on tapes the feds are using, which the freeholder has heard, but will not reveal the content to me.
The mayor’s Chief Rival claims it won’t matter if the Virgin Mayor is convicted or not. The rival is planning a recall election for the fall. But others claim a recall is just a pipe dream.
Her connection to the Virgin Mayor is through RR, other wise she would not have lied for him in September when she told me RR had broken away from the Virgin Mayor and had plans to run for mayor himself, with RR the only “clean candidate” in the election.
RR, however, recently told D her replacement in our office, that he never intended to run for mayor. I suspect this is true and that he simply brokered a deal with the Virgin Mayor to get a government job.
She included a picture of RR in her collection from the fundraiser.
It is difficult to tell if they are still romantically involved with each other. She may have switched her allegiance to the mayor himself or Joey D – the real mastermind in city hall.
Of course, her poetry and Facebook remarks seem to contradict some of her political maneuvers, such as all that stuff about giving up on love and learning to live alone with her cats and Netflix.
And just who was she addressing on her Facebook account when calling him a liar and for him to shut up?
I’m trying to imagine the situation behind the scenes, the falling in and the falling out, the personal mingling with the political, and her need to trickle up to a place where she is immune and still has clout.
As said before, it’s like trying to figure out how a watch works without opening the watch to see its mechanisms. I dare not get close to any of these or risk getting sucked up into the vortex again.
Sunday, December 25, 2022
Puppet master with cut strings February 18, 2013
I’m amazed at how much different things seem in retrospect, as I look back at notes for poems I was never brave enough to post, poems that seemed to encapsule particular moments when a choice could have altered the universe, and reflected intense feelings I was too scared to express at the time (perhaps still am).
A moment of choice such as that one early on when she sent me photographs of her and her friend in her apartment, and the images I concocted in my head of their love -making, as if she had tied me up in a corner to make me watch.
“The heat of it,” I wrote in those old notes, “burning inside of me, the need of it, the in and out of it, in which I cannot take part, feeling that same ache to seek the soft inside where the world closes in around you, but where you can never remain, drawn out again by cosmic forces only to force your way back in, in a never-ending in and out, the intruder making unwelcome (or even welcome) advances, seeking to remain when the real joy is neither to remain in or out but the friction of the in and out, stirred up by the ache to remain, with me, as if bound and gagged, forced to watch as others engage, the in and out of it, the intensity of being helpless to observe it all, but never take part.”
Looking back, it all seems so insane, all those moments when I could have surrendered, letting her do whatever she chose to do, to let her have the control she clearly desired to have, over life and the cosmos, to choose whether or not to inspire or deny, leaving me to strange pleasure of being wrung dry, the dilemma of a voyeur, how it might have been easier to let her pull the strings, to make this arm move or that foot, to force me to bow or kneel – such as the way I felt that night during the opening of the Cuban restaurant, texting me to come and when I did, telling me she meant the texts for her brother, the feeling of being tied and gagged there as well, placed in a corner to watch, a helpless voyeur neither inside or out.
Such poems with such observations were just too painful to post back then, and maybe still are, knowing that to surrender, to give in to someone else’s will, may indeed have been the wisest choice I never made.
Now, all these months later, over a remarkably painful landscape, I realize she was always in control, even when she clearly didn’t think so, and that in the end, it would have been easier to admit it.
Her most recent poems are painful to watch as she struggles to find herself, and how ill appreciated she is in her new circumstances, the puppet master holding strings to puppets who seem to exploit her as if they (we or everybody) think we are in control.
Saturday, December 24, 2022
The golden kiss? February 17, 2013
I don’t know why it took so long for me to closely examine her music the way I have with her poems, especially because I never stopped listening to her music from the day she gave me her CD early last year, listening to it over and over in my car during my long drive to the auxiliary office and back, and when the CD wore out, I listened on line – something my owner no doubt took note of when he perused by work computer.
Why I picked this song to examine first is also a mystery. It is not my favorite by far, regardless of how brilliantly performed, a jazz piece in which she does some serious scat singing.
Perhaps it is because the theme is so similar to her later poems about living in the moment and has vague echoes of her meeting the old woman on that cruise and how she later wore through appointment books – and not with lists of laundry.
There is an intense brutality exploited by the harsh piano and competing guitar, as if two knights were dealing for the affections of the seductive voice rising and falling in intervals and into passionate scats, a velvet glove seeking to soothe the brutality of the musical iron hand, two hands full of intensity and lust, her alluring vocal floating over the thrust and jab of the piano and guitar as the drum beats out a steady rhythm against everybody can compete, her voice weaving in and out, there and then, then not there, falling into an extended emotional moan so completely soothing at time as to lure away attention from the musical conflict waged underneath, a delightful distraction, full of passion and pain.
The voice is something so soothing you are tempted to wrap it around you like a cloak, but the interchange of instruments, the rising and falling, the slow steady mounting to a crescendo, makes it impossible to ignore the instrumental conflict, as if the guitar and piano take turns with her, and then, near the end engage with her at the same time.
The song is not my favorite because I’m not a fan of jazz, though some of my close friends are students of it, allowing me to recognize how well-crafted this song is. I’m not sure who is playing the piano, but her husband is definitely playing the guitar.
Her musical work seems to strongly resemble those poems of hers I’m familiar with (there is a whole batch of poems from that period I’ve heard about but never seen, so I assume her songs reflect those as well.)
This song like some of the poems I am familiar with is a commentary of people’s all too busy lives.
“Everybody runs around, places to go, people to see,” she sings, going on to suggest that life is about taking risks as a gateway to happiness.
She sings that she’s been where other people are, especially when alone, her busy brain forgetting all this.
“Sometimes I just ride the bliss,” she sings, and eases into an extended and seductive scat as the instruments ride in over here.
“I want to feel it. I want to be it now,” she sings when the instruments ease down. “Can you imagine how many lovers, how many lives without the golden kiss.”
Then, as if to echo a poem she wrote about that old lady on the cruise, she sings, “We need to stop planning so hard… not to handle things, manage things only endless….” Perhaps bliss.
Then, she comes back to the chorus of feeling it and being it, an intense sensuality again emphasized by the instrumental outro, of piano and guitar vying for the attention of her amazing voice.
Friday, December 23, 2022
Where did the inspiration go? February 16, 2013
A once-great psychist one claimed the study of an atom is a lot like trying to figure out how a watch works by never being able to open the watch to look.
I feel about the same when I try to figure how what is going on in her life when I read her poems.
The pattern of her poetry has changed dramatically from the summer when she seemed perpetually enraged at me.
Over the last few months, she seems to reflect frustration of being trapped in a life she did not intend to end up in, and the poem she posted today is more of the same.
In this, she continues what appears to be an internal dialogue with herself, if not so much trying to understand the reasons behind her internment (as was the case in the poem she posted last week), then more of a bitter commentary on her current condition, displaying an intense sense of melancholy, asking herself why she puts up with it all, sacrificing her immediate needs both financially as well her goals for the future.
What is her next stepping stone when she seems to be stuck in mid-stream?
At the same time, she tries to live her life trying not to think about her current condition, how much she sacrifices for other people when they clearly don’t appreciate her, even though what they do affects her daily life in every possible way – perhaps an allusion to one of her previous poems where one part of her is trying to get her to face facts.
She is bitter about her “head in sand” existence, and makes reference to her apparently role in helping “direct other people to Heaven” when those very people make her life a living hell..
Just whom she means remains a mystery.
She works for the Virgin Mayor and RR, and others. She may mean the other person she had a recent falling out with, but he or they have clearly drained her of her positivity as she wonders where her wonder went.
This is a very short poem that implies her role as sacrificing for other people who tend to treat her badly while she struggles to survive, trying to do the job while ignoring the abuses. This idea of living “hand to mouth” while hiding her head in the sand from the ugly truth that she is being used.
Why does she endure it?
Her poem seems to locate her troubles at her job, less at home, implying an unhealthy work place in what may also involve a personal relationship, perhaps mirroring somewhat some of what went on in our office when she was still employed here.
Again, we get the idea that she is playing the role of a loyal soldier, even though it is clear her efforts are unappreciated.
One can picture her dragging herself home to her lonely apartment where she ponders for how long she can put up with it all, bitter about her predicament, unable to stir up the passion she has relied upon in the past to inspire her to some new venture.
The poem’s music comes with vivid imagery such as in phrases like “hand to mouth,” “Head to sand,” “wonder where your wonder went,” and the clever phrases of “Directing people who put you through hell to heaven.”
Is she referring to the mayor she is trying to save, though the plural use of “people” implies more than one person, perhaps the inner circle for whom she works hard, but who abuse her.
She is clearly putting up with it all for far less money or credit than she thinks she deserves.
The poem asks why she put up with it, how does it suit her to sit there, barely surviving, pretending like things aren’t as bad as they are, helping people who don’t give her credit and in fact harangue her, and Ironically, she wonders where her inspiration went.
Life is still a struggle to survive.
More and more she reminds me of Marylin Monroe and Princess Diana, women who have given their all, only to get used and discarded. It’s taken me time, but I’ve come around to sympathizing with her situation.
Thursday, December 22, 2022
Politics as usual February 15, 2013
Attaining power is difficult, and keeping it, as much a struggle, needs money to build it.
This is the reason the Virgin Mayor needed to do his fundraiser and why those around him cling to his nearly kingly robes.
But it was a surprise that the owner of the venue allowed RR to attend since RR once tried to shake him down for protection money when he was still a cop, and what eventually drew the attention of the feds to him, setting the stage for his big lie, one he would tell over and over again, how he worked undercover to help bring down the police chief, when all he really did was turn in his own friends in the department.
Although I was also invited to the swank affair, I chose not to for obvious reasons – she would be there, decked out, an amazingly beautiful distraction I did not need to engage at this moment in time, just when it’s taken so many months to recover from her.
Ironically, I passed the doors to the place on my way to a rare assignment just up the road from it, tempted to pause, but wiser for not doing so.
The same logic applied for this as for the magazine party so many months ago. That’s her turf, not mine, and she knows how to blossom in it, where I would shrivel up in the corner, embarrassed at my attraction, and scared to death that she might turn the dogs out on me.
She’s amazing eye candy for the mayor’s supporters, but she’d dangerous for me.
Besides, as much as I admire the Virgin Mayor, I disliked the corrupt crowd around him, and wonder how she puts up with them since essentially I’ve concluded she is not corrupt, but if she’s still tied to RR, then she’s being forced to follow the money the way RR is, and events like this only make it all so obvious.
Politics is an organized sport – but a sport in which everybody cheats, back stabs, and does everything and anything to get the drop on everybody else.
While the Virgin Mayor has enough money to fund his own campaign, he can’t rely on buying votes. He can’t give every resident of his town a job. He needs to build a network of people who have followers he can count on to bear the weight of the campaign, to show that he’s really about real people and not just political hacks. People hold fundraisers to show that they still have popular appeal.
Yet I was puzzled when I talked to him Wednesday and learned he was selling tickets at $1,000 ahead, far out of reach of ordinary people.
He’s playing to the big shots, which may explain why she said she needed to get plastered before she went, she’s that nervous being around important people, still she also said she intended to dress to impress – I can only imagine.
Again, this recalls her poem about settling for a lesser role. But that’s not her style. She is the kind of people who needs to be (and possibly should be) important, and yet oddly enough, she is a wallflower who has to work at it, developing routines that allow her to get ahead. As her poem about the old woman on the cruise ship alluded to, she used to hate the people who got to cut in front of the line, and yet eventually became one.
She is beautiful enough, talented enough and savvy enough to make this work, when the rest of us envy her from the back of the line – one more reason for me not to go to the fundraiser to see her in her glory, trying to advance her agenda.
Who knows how disappointed she might feel in a room full of the usual suspects, some of whom let her hang around, but offer her not avenue for advancement, the truly big shots too remote to access at such an event, most of whom are boring as hell, wealthy vendors looking for contracts etc.
By bringing her camera, she got to play the role of official photographer, and did me a service when she posted their photos, allowing me to put a face to the roque’s gallery, giving me a road map of who is who behind the scenes – a lot of big-time players on a small-town stage.
Politics is the wrong venue for someone like her and with her talents. She needs to meet people in the arts, people who can recognize her abilities and offer her a way to get her foot inside the door, a different kind of power elite, not the stuffy old shirts of politics, but the more alluring world of creativity.
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
A great gift? February 12, 2013
There is intense sadness in all of this, trying to make sense of how a person as immensely talented at she is, gets trapped into horrible situations like the one she appears to be trapped in.
She is not alone, of course, just much more talented in so many more areas than other people I know, who had lost their way.
I’m most struck by her poetry, writing and music. She apparently is a good an artist as she is a poem and as good a photographer as she is an artist.
So, what went wrong?
Her poetry talks about giving up on finding love and spending her life alone, something her Facebook account seemed to reflect when she reopened it up to public scrutiny.
How much of this is real or permanent, I can’t tell. But she certainly is involved in a conflict with someone, and it’s horrible to think that someone with so much love to give shouldn’t be able to find anybody worthy to receive it.
I listen to her music and feel the passion in each of her songs and wonder if she wrote them for particular people and if those people appreciated the great gift she gave them.
I hope all this pain she is suffering through is temporary and that she eventually will move on to so successful career and find someone who might make her happy, someone worthy of her, someone who won’t go home to someone else late at night.
I get a lot of internal stuff from her poetry and wish I could have read some of the poems she posted before her current site, stuff from which she apparently drew a few poems to repost, or the poems she published while at college – to better understand what she was like then and how she came to be where she is now.
Maybe she’ll repost the old poems so I can look at them as well.
Her songs, of course, are a whole different kettle of fish, harder to interpret than her poetry, yet full of potent sensuality. I’ve only started recently to study them in detail as to what makes them so effective. I wonder if she will write any more. Maybe when she finds someone she’ll continue with that aspect of her career. I certainly hope so.
This massive waste of talent stuns me.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
Queen of the Prom February 14, 2013
At heart, she is a scared little girl, trying to keep her vulnerability secret, someone who wants someone to sit with her and hold her through the night, keeping her company on her couch or in her bed, someone she can count on to be there when her hamster brain goes haywire in the early morning hours.
And to date, she hasn’t found a man (or a woman) who has lived up to that expectation. Men mostly use her, and then go home to their wives, leaving her to spend the lonely night in anticipation of what the early morning hours will bring.
She doesn’t mind the sex, but it disparate for the affection, the tender touch, the caress that is more than just a come-on, something more meaningful than foreplay.
Yes, she wants to feel important and to be recognized for her talents, but she also wants to be appreciated as a woman, not just for sex.
Each time she invites someone up to her apartment, she expects it to turn out that way, hoping that man or woman will spend the night, cuddling before sex and after, snuggling on the couch as she and that person take in something on TV (Netflix perhaps) and yet, almost always, she finds herself locking the door after they leave, hearing the thud of their steps hurrying down the stairs, the slam of the front door, the roar of their car as they hurry home.
This may explain why she got drunk last night before she went to the part, dressing up for the $1,000 a plate political fundraiser her boss put on, just as she dressed up last summer when our office threw a launch party for our latest magazine, showing off her new earrings and black dress for her friends before she plunged into the uncertain world of political high finance the Virgin Mayor is building around him, she serving as eye candy for his potential donors, she as she served that role when she played with the band a few years ago.
The whole idea of her not needing a man went up in smoke when she told her close girlfriend in Spanish that she had taken on as a lover someone she was tutoring, perhaps part of a pattern that has been with her her whole life, her friends telling her “no le digas a nadie” or “manténlo en secreto.”
She made a big deal of her attending the fundraiser last night, sounding very much like a girl who had gone to her prom, her friends and family giving her words of encouragement as they admired her makeup, her black dress and yes, her new earrings.
Her mother and friends went on and on with party suggestions, and she built up her role at the event in a way that made it seem the party was for her instead of for the mayor or that she played a more important part in it than she really did.
She may even have believed this herself as she stood looking at herself in the mirror: “Espejo, espejo en la pared, ¿quién es la más bella de todas?”
No doubt, she must have looked stunning.
Monday, December 19, 2022
Life as a World War II submarine movie February 11, 2013
When you talk about a spy in the house of life, you can’t help but mean people like the salesman, J, who is without a doubt attracted to her, but may be scared he might blow it with his current girlfriend if he makes a move.
I get the impression she’s attracted to him as well, at least; she liked hanging out in his corner of the office when she still worked there.
And now that she’s gone, he’s one of those she still maintains contact with, including our former temporary boss, the owner, outgoing writer, A, and, of course, the office gossip.
Yet from my brief conversation with our former temporary boss last week, her contact with these people may be minimal, an occasional comment on social media, or in the case of our former temporary boss, an occasional call on the phone – just enough to keep him interested (the way the guy from the shelter is still interested).
Our owner, however, most likely has the most contact physically, but gauging from the conversation in Facebook last night, she and J talk pretty frequently, if only by social media – although she clearly has some second thoughts about what was said since she went back and edited out some of the conversation later.
This reminded me of something she cautioned me about early last year about posting remarks on her Facebook page.
“Other people have access,” she said, “including my family.”
Still, I get the impression she needs Facebook as a kind of recruiting tool, and as a means to keep her legend of loyal followers to feel as if they are still connected.
In one recent on-line conversation with a guy, she reverted to the old Mae West line, “why don’t you come up and see me some time,” only to edited this out later as well.
I may have gotten J in trouble with her because I asked him to contact her about using some of the photos, she had taken that the owner wanted me to retake for our website. This resulted in my getting banned again from her Facebook account and losing even the alternative avenues to communication such as through J or Barbara.
But I suspect she may maintain some link to my Facebook account that I’m not aware of, if only to keep track of what I am posting.
Banning someone has the dubious benefit of preventing you from accessing their pages, and I’m sure my posts make her nervous, even though I haven’t posted anything about her since early fall.
Her seeing me posting messages to J and Barbara must have caused her to go into a fit.
Or perhaps J told her, which would be more problematic, since he is someone I have confided in over the last year – especially during that period last summer when she or our former temporary boss appeared to be trying to get me fired.
But she can’t afford to abandon her Facebook page, any more than she can change her email or phone number. Too many connections ride on these things.
Sometimes, I think we’re living in an old World War II submarine movie. She suspects I’m out here somewhere in the deeps, but just can’t seem to locate me precisely, leaving her to imagine what I might be up to, even when in reality I’m not up to anything at all.
Sunday, December 18, 2022
Caught up in a tornado February 10, 2013
Without a real clear indication of what exactly is going on in her life except that she has had a falling out with someone, most like RR – although it could be anybody – her latest poem is no great surprise.
Life is crazy for her, and worse, trying to find a reason for it, only makes it even more insane.
As she has done in the past, the poem is an internal dialogue that appears to be two parts of her discussing the situation. One part of her is desperate for a reason; the other part claims searching for a reason may be why she is going crazy and wants to just let it all go and move on.
This appears to be the culmination of a series of poems that have depicted like going from bad to worse, while she struggles with day to day living. While this poem is not about her getting stuck in an insignificant role, it is more about coping with a bad situation, with an overwhelming sense of craziness and her struggle to make sense of it all, part of her needing to know the reason, while the other part basically says, don’t ask – just keep going.
The poem is a back and forth about why this is happening to her and how she is unlikely to drive herself crazy because she can’t find a reason.
The poem has three stanzas, the first representing the part of her looking for a reason, the second a response saying even asking for a reason is driving her crazy, while the third stanza argues she should abandon a search and just get on with her life.
As pointed out in a pervious journal, she is clearly in the middle of an emotional mess, fed up with someone she no longer cares for, and does not want to hear from, claiming she has popcorn, Netflix and her two cats to keep her company; she has no need of a man.
As usual with her better poems, this poem is cleverly structured, using repeated words and lines but with slight variations that give the repeat a slightly different meaning from the first.
The first two stanzas largely mirror each other – “There has to be a reason” as the opening line of the first, “The quest for a reason,” in the second.
“When things go crazy-like,” in the first stanza is mirrored in the second stanza with “makes you go all crazy-like’ in the second.
Both stanzas use “swirling into more than you can handle.”
Yet, there is an important difference between the first and second stanza. The first stanza has a more global view of crazy, where the second makes it very personal. “Things go crazy” in the first, “Makes you go crazy” in the second.
While there is an attempt in the first stanza to be objective about all this, the second stanza makes it clear this is a very person matter, internalizing the conflict. In the first, the cause of the crazy is more remote, while in the second, she is claiming she is driving herself crazy trying to figure it all out. The third stanza says she shouldn’t bother and just get on with her life.
She is clearly struggling to make sense of what is happening to her – and from what she has posted on Facebook – in the middle of emotional turmoil and a relationship gone bad. One part of her is asking, “Why is this happening to me?” while the other part says, “why drive yourself nuts trying to figure it out and get on with life.”
Sometimes there is no logic, no explanation as to why things happen, and it is pointless to spend your time seeking out these imponderables, when the ultimate goal is to survive.
There is no hint of blame in this poem as there have been in others. Yet it is clear she is conflicted and needs to make sense of her life at this moment. She is unhappy and puzzled as to what went wrong. She doesn’t have a clue as to what to do or where to go, except to keep on keeping on, perhaps as she has always done, taking staggering steps to get through the “swirling” that would keep her from doing anything, an image perhaps of the helpless Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, swept up by a tornado, with no real clue as to where she’ll land, and she is telling herself not to worry about it.