Guardian angel? May 8, 2013

  

 

After she posted her recent poem about her friends in Haverton, I went scrambling back to a poem she posted earlier this year that I realize only after the fact that it was about him, too – startling only because I failed to see it my first time analyzing the poem.

This was a poem about her guardian angel, someone she sometimes forgets but is always there for her, even in spirit when she is alone.

Just knowing he is somewhere out in the world comforts her, a guardian angel, who I knew about from last fall, but didn’t put him together with this poem until she posted the new poem last week to him.

The previous poem back in March talked about having his “remembered arms” around her, and I mistakenly assumed (always foolish to assume) that the poem was written to a lover.

In way, he is more than a lover. He is a central figure in her life who lifts her up whenever she falls and bruises her knees., whenever she has “fallen again.” He tells her.

In a previous journal, I referred to him like a brother. But he’s even more than that.

How I could have missed the connection between that poem and him is puzzling, since I knew she fled to him last fall after she quit our office, hoping to have him heal her wounds, something she apparently does every time her life falls apart.

How long this has been going on, it is hard to say. It is possible he has always been there for her from back in those days when they grew up in the same town together.

It is an amazing relationship – and would be puzzling to most people, who might wonder why these two didn’t fall deeply and passionately in love.

But I understood it, because I have a similar relationship with my Cyber Nanny – a woman I grew up with, and have been friends with since Kindergarten.  She was the most popular girl in school all the way through college, a jet set girl, who got let in whenever she went to Club 54, who accompanied millionaires and movie stars in their Lear Jets for weekend jaunts across country.

I was a misfit from the first day I met her and remained that most of my life. Old classmates who saw us together scratched their heads about our association.

Although I was more than a little tempted, we never had sex. A romantic engagement would have ruined what we had.

I’m sure the same is not true with her and her guardian angel. Somehow, they managed to avoid letting it get in the way of their more important relationship.

 

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Catch her if you can May 7, 2013

  

  

Needless to say, her poem telling someone he ain’t gonna get it no way no how shook me because it brought me back to the warry days of last summer when I thought everything I did or said was a potential mine field – or quick sand as she put it.

The hit from Haverton convinced me she is still looking at my website and so I’m back to the mine set of thinking anything she posts – or more importantly, anything I do to react, is a trap.

It’s moments like this when I appreciate my cyber nanny and the fact that I keep most of my reactions locked away in a poetry journal. What she doesn’t see can’t hurt me.

This paranoia has been re-examining poems I thought I had already figured out, searching for clues to some other more nefarious meaning I did not detect during my first analysis.

As with my previous attempts to find a connection between her poems and me, I come up empty.

Whatever emotional crisis she is undergoing, it does not have to do with me. Her world is crumbling and she is struggling to find a way to cope.

If that one poem was an attack on me, then it is an aberration, something utterly out of context with the poems she’s posted up to now, otherwise, it remains what it seems – the next step in the final devolution of her romance, a bitter, angry retort to the man she once adored.

I got back to one of the poems prior to her bitter one, where she left the whole thing in the hands of her lover.

It is one of those poems any man in his right mind would love to have gotten from a woman like her, and so it is easy to misinterpret it, just as it is easy to find double meanings in most her poems.

She lives behind a veil of vague double entendre she can say what she wishes, and yet later be able claim she meant something else.

Yet, the more emotional she gets – in these later poems – the less she disguises her meaning, and it become clear that she is in legitimate distress – not as it was with me, but real heart break.

There is no trap in any of this. Mere desperation. And she needs him to make the choice for both of them, a choice he apparently refused to make or at best made in a way she did not like, and so inspired the more angry later poem – I possibly mistook at aimed at me.

It is hugely important to keep my own emotions out all this, and not to assume anything.

If she is conscious of me, it is as if of a ghost, she aware that I am out in the universe, and for her own protection, she needs to check up on me from time to time – explaining the page hit from Pennsylvania. If this is the case, the poem and its rage merely coincidentally echo the past, and although some of what she is saying may be relevant to me a year ago, it not about me now – something that would be a relief if true.

Yet even in the poem about surrendering herself to her lover, there are disturbing echoes such as who might benefit from her decline.

How can anybody benefit from her losing, least of all her lover?

She must know I read her poems. But it would sheer folly to believe these poems have anything to do with me, although if these things be truthful, then she is exposing inner self in an alarming way, throwing open her head and heart to people she previously believed might do her harm. You have to wonder what her Brooklyn stalker makes of all this? Is he aware enough to recognize what is really going on between the lines of these poems, the anguish she feels, the chill of a lover who she believed loved her deeply.

“Please be there,” she says, needing someone with strong hands bear her.

It would seem from the poems that followed this, her lover did not catch her in mid-fall, and if she is to survive, she is once more going to have to resort to her own resources.

 

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A penny for your thoughts? May 6, 2013

   

We come back to where she was last fall, if for different reasons, down and out, not in Paris, but in her own misery.

So, it is not surprising that she would post a poem to her oldest and dearest friend in Haverton, apparently someone she always turns to when her world falls apart, someone I went into more detail in journal entry last fall and mentioned in previous journal about her searching out my website.

This is a friend she grew up with, greatly admires, and has come to trust.

This explains the drastic shift in tone from her previous poem, trading extreme bitterness for intense tenderness and affection.

She has nowhere else to go, so she goes home – not to her biological family, but to someone as closer or closer than her biological brother.

This poem is a lot like a letter home (even though by all indications, she actually made the trip to see him).

She is playing off the old cliché of “a penny for your thoughts” converting this to how much of a collection of pennies she’d have for each time she thought of him.

She’s poor so she can’t afford much more than a penny for “every time I think of you or see you or witness you in your endless, beautiful action.”

He has quiet moments, too, she says, but these are rare, since he has so many things he can do, thinks that serve to protect him against the ills of the world.

She calls him “more than perfect” just the way he is, how he expresses in affection “inside the crease of his brow,” and how he bears the burden of others (including hers), a broad-shouldered Atlas, who is weary with the effort, but tells himself he loves doing it.

She mentions how his voice changes when he lets his defenses down, exposing how scared he sometimes gets, and tends to deny “the fact that you have needs and wants,” which he reluctantly begins to accept – if only to make her happy.

This passage suggests (and perhaps I read too much into it) that her relationship with him is not completely platonic, and while they are friends of the most sincere sort, they may also comfort each other physically, something she may encourage out of sympathy and legitimate compassion.

She admires his humility as well as his talent, knowing he could boast or seek material success, and yet does not. She notes how deep in grease his life is (working some fast-food place as noted in my journal last fall), serving people, and how he will sometimes stop, lie down in the strangest places, such as the floor “where those you serve have sprung from.”

This is an odd expression, perhaps implying that he’s better than the people he serves.

She admires, too, his odd gestures, fingers to face when he is thoughtful and when he thinks nobody is looking.

The intensity of her admiration comes partly because he is someone who is always there for her when she needs him most and comes at a time when she is down and out in a way she hasn’t been in years. She needs him to reassure her again.

Yet surprisingly, her breakdown differs from some of those she suffered in the past. She is still employed. She has not fled to some remote location. She still lives where she lives.

It is hear heart that needs repairing, and she is reaching out to the one person she is confident can repair her.

Although the tone of the poem is extremely positive, it clearly shows she had hit rock bottom.

She apparently wrote this after having gone out to see him last week, and come home with the still-warm feelings of having see him, a letter of gratitude, although it is uncertain how long she can maintain he temporary repair with all of the mounting pressure of her job and her shattered love life.

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A friendly visit? April 29, 2013

  

 

I was wrong. She didn’t take the photo she posted at her father’s house, but at her best friend’s house in Haverton, Pennsylvania, and the dog pictured, is most likely his.

This ties into the poem she posted to him – the analysis of which I’ll probably do tomorrow, since it says a lot about her curtain condition.

She apparently used her iPad to check my webpage late last night or early this morning, looking over a few pages I posted about modern feminism. This came via a google search rather than the typical entry via my blog page link.

This is not the first time I’ve caught her searching out my content, even though I’ve posted very little (consciously) about her since the summer. Her IP address shows up so rarely, I assumed she had moved on from thinking about me. In recent months, I have caught her on my pages only one other time. Perhaps she thought it was safe for her to look at my pages from Haverton, suggesting that perhaps over these months she had been on my pages more frequently than I’ve been able to detect, using other IP addresses or a VPN to hide her IP address.

The feminist essays may have intrigued her enough for her to get careless, leaving a signature I can detect. (It is possible that her visits are as a rare as they seem and that she is ignorant of the ability of people to track IP addresses.

This is disturbing for several years, not least, is the question whether or not her angry poem was written with me in mind.

And as the poem hinted at, she might be worried that I am posting something about her, and may routinely do searches to make certain I’m not.

This suggests that she is still wary or concerned about me.

The other issue involves her retreating to her sanctuary in her best friend’s home. She always seeks him out when she is in the midst of a crisis – an idea supported by her most recent poem about him. Her romantic entanglement along with the Virgin Mayor’s legal troubles no doubt keep her up at night.

The fact that she needs to check my website even when she is seeking comfort of her friend suggests I’m still in the mix when I assumed I was well out of her life.

The romantic disaster seems to take precedent over her political woes, and could prompt her to finally make another leap – maybe take another exotic vacation somewhere such as she did after she broke it off with her chef in New York.

She might seek out some other place to go, although I’m told she’s up for a hefty raise at her current job, and so this might tempt her to remain, even at the risk of having her Virgin Mayor convicted.

I don’t know why she feels the need to look over her shoulder to see if I’m behind her. I’m perfectly happy to observer her from afar, to read her poetry and listen to her music.

Again, I’m perplexed by her angry poem and whom it might be aimed at, her recent lover, her stalker from Brooklyn or possibly (and I dread the idea of it) me.

At one time, very early in all this (but not for long), I assumed I was more important to her than I actually was. Now, I think the exact opposite, and like the idea that I’m not on her emotional radar.

If I am, why would I be more important (in a negative way) to her than any of the other people who have come and gone from her life?

I hope to god all of this is merely coincidence – the checking on my website and the poem that has haunting echoes of the past.

I love her poems, her music, her talent; I don’t love her.

 

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Ashes and echoes April 28, 2013

  

From resignation to rage is not as big a step as one might believe.

Taken in the contest of the series of poem’s she has posted over the last two months, you have to think this is the next step in the ever-deteriorating situation and what was once great passion has turned into deep bitterness.

Had she posted this poem a year ago after the debacle at the bar, I would have better as intimidated by it as I was about the forgiveness poem she directed at me during the summer.

It is difficult to say if the target of this poem feels as deeply humiliated by it as I felt back then.

Somehow, I suspect not – even though this poem and many of the previous poems aimed at him suggest that she once perceived him as a man of great sensitivity.

Again, the caveat here is the presumption that all of these recent poems were about the same man, and that this sensitive man she fell so hard for has finally done something  beyond the pale, so that there is no longer a plea to remain together, but a significant severance, an ax blow cutting off the umbilical cord once and for all.

My best guess is that he wanted to carry on the affair with her, abandoning all pretense of love, this despite the apparent drama associated with his wife finding out about the original affair – as suggested in some of her previous poems.

Such a concept might have made her feel cheap and used, exposing finally just how unworthy he was having her in the first place, and now she wants no part of him.

She wants and deserves real love, and apparently had mistaken what he had offered as that, only to have the blinders torn from her eyes and allowing to see what he was all about really.

The intensity of her poem is reflected in her anger as she states matter-of-factly: “You will not get me” -- and tells him not to try, or even think about it, or breathe it, suggesting he might say or have said something about her to someone else.

“It will not happen,” she says. “I am the Phoenix Queen. You burn me and I will rise again and again.”

Then, she does on to say he will burn as well, then she will rise, and will burn herself, which will allow her to finally have peace.

There is something very dark in this last passage that stirs up memories from a year ago, something akin to her roof top episode and the idea that self-destruction might ultimately bring her peace.

Hurt her and she will hurt herself, and cause him to suffer the guilt of it.

All this, of course, is pure speculation, and indeed, my interpretation may be utterly wrong.

It is possible that this poem might be aimed at me, something reigniting the rage she left over from last fall.

Although I’ve tried to be discreet  when inquiring about her activities in the town she works at, this is a political world where trusted sources broker information, and often the same people who feed me information are perfectly willing to feed information about me to others, and might well have taken my inquiries back to her, reminiscent of the cruel mistake I made last June when I confided in our former temporary boss about her,  something I vowed never to repeat. Although any question about her political affiliations might well have played horribly in her paranoia about me.

But taken in context, I think this poem is about her lover, and not me.

Had this poem come out at the time of her resignation last fall, I might have concluded she believe me responsible, and might well have mistakenly believed I was still in love with her, and this poem would have put me in my place once and for all.

If the poem is aimed at me now, she is blasting me for something I have not done about something I do not feel.

Rather, I suspect that she has come full circle into a situation similar to mine with this man. The rage seems to fresh, even if the points might have once been valid regarding me.

I assume – and this might well be a dreadful mistake in itself –that her estranged lover has been talking about her to other people, perhaps a trusted friend, who reported back to her and she felt the need to set the record straight.

Yet her threat to self-destruct remains uncomfortably similar to her once-time threat from the roof top after I abandoned her at the bar, when she expressed a similar rage that reflected the intensity of the pain she felt then – and now.

Perhaps new pain reminds her of that old pain, and thus the poem stirs up guilt in me because it echoes something I might have been guilty of a year ago.

This idea that she can only finds peace by dying remains a constant theme in her life, something more than tragic, because for all the bad things men bring into her life, none of us are worth the ultimate price she might enact as her revenge.

 

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Rolling Snake eyes April 24, 2013

  

Guilt, if her current poem can be believed, can be as complex as love, and clearly, she has moved beyond the point of redeeming lost love. She seems to fight back against the idea that she did anything wrong. She seems to blame the social rules, which deny her what she wants and needs.

She suggests that when it comes to love, there is injustice in denying her. She seems to be seeking a way to cope with the pain of her failed romance, and the poem takes the next step in a slow, downward trajectory.

This is a very bitter poem and seems determined to find something if not someone to blame for her misery.

To some degree, she blames herself for her forgetting what she has always needed to do to survive.

If she could get what she wanted in a world that is so compromised, she would feel better, some consolation for living in an otherwise unfair world.

Yet, she cannot get around the fact that the man she loves is already married, and this somehow puts her in the wrong for wanting him, and she can’t even forgive herself.

The poem raises the fundamental question: should love be bound by ordinary rules of morality?

Her answer is clearly no. Love should prevail over social standards.

She opens the poem with the concept that everything is turned upside down -- a new world order that destroys what should be positive feelings (about love) and has left her “frozen and dismayed” down deep.

The poem suggests that the whole love affair got exposed in a “scandalous way” and that he may have panicked when the secret came out. She indicates that her pain comes as a result of her forgetting “to obey the anti-rules of day-to-day existence.”

This in itself is a complex idea, implying that she should have been more careful, even less public, and treated the romance for what it was: a secret affair.

If she could have gotten what she wanted even in this  “up-ended down-righted way,” she might have been happy, suggesting perhaps she might have continued the affair, even though she clearly wanted much more.

It also suggests his panic and his desperation to save his marriage at any cost, a matter that frustrates her, and because of his marriage, she feels guilty when in reality in another world love might prevail, even in the face of public scandal.

The affair is clearly over. The wife apparently found out and has given him the ultimatum to choose which woman he will spend the rest of his life with, and he clearly chose the wrong way as far as our poet is concerned, although going back to the start of it all, she well-knew this affair would shatter his world if pursued.

She rolled the dice, hoping that when he was forced to choose, he would choose her over his wife.

She guessed wrong. She rolled snake eyes. Now she suffers the consequences.

 

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Surviving the Titanic April 23, 2013

  

Her latest posted poem makes me think of some of the last scenes of the 1997 film “Titanic” – not the disaster stuff, but that moment when she is floating on the debris and her lover is in the water beside her, slowly drifting apart.

Her poem is about resignation, finally accepting the reality of a situation, and the next step in the slow dissolution of a relationship she once had high hopes for.

This moves beyond the point of her clinging to hope, or even begging for him to reconsider. She accepts the romance as a lost cause and admits that the affair has had less desirable side effects.

She opens the poem asking, “Where does the dreaming go,” after it gets smacked by reality, turning it into dust.

She clearly feels embarrassed by how she fooled herself and how she ought to have known better – optimistic thoughts she says now she had no right to think.

Again, we come to the bitter bit where she made assumptions about him, and his marriage, and how her relationship could go on, sneaking affection behind the back of his wife, calling it “The luxury of a double life,” something of a fantasy she made up in her own head.

And then in an even more bitter bit, she regrets the trust  she had, and regrets thinking there was more to the relationship than there was.

This is among some of the most painful writing of hers I have read so far.

She clearly believed he loved her as much as she did him, and seems to admit now that for him this was just another affair, a flirtation from which he can easily walk away.

The whole thing comes with the painful baggage, which gets dragged behind them: “Labored consequences” which she suspected from the beginning when she struggled to keep this as an affair of the mind, knowing even back then any physical contact would destroy his comfortable world.

She has no right to know the details or to expect anything in return, and while it may seem like she is taking responsibility when she says “It’s my fault,” she’s not.

She blames herself for expecting more than what this turned out to be.

There is no contrition here, nor perhaps should there be.

She walked into this with her eyes closed, or with visions of a great romance, and came away with something that feels just a little dirty.

And it’s her fault for expecting things to turn out some other way.

Ion this poem, she Titanic has sunk and the great romance an earlier chapter has given away to the icy reality to two people forced to go their separate ways.

While not said, the tone of the poem suggests that the affair has been discovered, and he chose to try to save himself, leaving her to drift of in her own guilt.

No, not guilt, more sad reflection of how gullible she was, and how she got taken in by a vision that wasn’t real, and with her experiences, she should have known better.

She caused her own hurt, and that’s a big part of this tragedy.

 

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Duality April 22, 2013

  

 

The silent weekend doesn’t surprise me.

She often doesn’t post poetry until Monday, and with her Facebook page closed to me, I can’t tell what conflicts are going on behind the scenes.

Her front page only conveys what she wants outsiders to see.

Her poetry suggests a shattered romance. It hard to tell how this effects daily life, since she appears capable of carrying on several existences simultaneously, two aspects of her public persona she can control, putting up or taking down messages she want to get out or retract.

To my knowledge, she has removed only a few poems from her poetry blog, where as her Facebook page – the personal one --  front and interior are always a work in progress, something she edits frequently, apparently in reaction to what others have to say, sometimes simply yanking back what appears to be a much too spontaneous reaction to something someone else might have posted.

Not having access to her inner sanctum, I am forced to rely on those things she wishes people to see, and this again is like Einstein’s idea of figuring out how a watch works by listening to it tick. And yet, her projections have some value when it comes to current events.

When dealing with her in the past, I always got the feeling that what she showed me was largely an act, a well-crafted narrative she adapted to each new situation, but never varying from the basic premise. Early on, she was “cubie,” who needed me to mentor her (when in fact she is a far better writer than I am and much more savvy when it comes to covering her beat that she pretended.) This was a variation from other previous jobs where she came in as a rookie in order to ingratiate herself with each boss on the rising rungs of her ladder to success, and something, she apparently needed only to modify slightly when it came to dealing those who replaced me on the ladder in our office.

This is not to say that she is totally insincere. She is simply relying on a well-established structure that has worked for her in the past, something to brace her again the uncertainty of a new work environment. After a year of reading and analyzing her poetry, I’ve come to understand how insecure she really is, and how, she is scared to expose her real feelings, acting out a part that she knows others will accept. All of this fell apart apparently recently when she found true love and have the whole house of cards fall in on her.

Looking back, I realize jus how wrong I handled everything with her, and how my reactions last year must have puzzled her. She usually has a handle of people and can predict how they are going to react to her act, and I didn’t follow the script.

This has to do with my own insecurities, which I won’t go into here.

As time went on, I learned to separate the put on personality (if that’s what it is) from the real self she rarely exposes, except in her poetry (and even then as she put it in a poetic slam at me – the poem is not the poet and so there is a limited amount of even that which can be taken on face value.)

She is very cryptic even in poetry, disguising her true meaning in complex metaphors so as to protect herself, aiming these at people clever enough to figure it out.

At first, I thought she did this because someone was looking over her shoulder (RR or some other political manipulator) and she could not afford to communicate more openly. As time goes on, I realize she is doing this to protect herself, she doesn’t want everybody to know her inner most feelings, though she also is desperate for someone to know. Those who get it, fine, those who don’t, too bad.

Her posting of photos of herself are also part of her need to control her image in the minds of those who have access, painting herself in particular moods such as sexy, happy, or competent.

Her last group of photos changed the mood of her page from dark Van Gogh like world where a man and woman cuddle to a picture of her cuddling a dog (most likely at her father’s house where she spent the weekend.) There is also a photo of her looking over her shoulder, a photo cropped out from a group shot with a message claiming there is love in that group, when sources in town hall claim the opposite may be true. She also posted a fortune that said she is destined to serve the public, trying to convince whomever is looking at the page that she is content with her lot in life, when as we all know, she is rarely content at remaining a cog in the wheel, and wants to be the person with her hand on the lever. She is stuck on a sinking ship and she knows it, she just doesn’t know yet how to get off, and is hiding her panic behind these images. She will bolt to some new career before the ship sinks, but it will be a rough ride for her until she does.

With all this said, the removal of the Wizard of Oz photo from her Facebook front page has been scratching my head as to its significance.

Was it a reaction to something I posted? Or am I once again reading into this something that isn’t there?

 

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Will she be moving on soon? April 25, 2013

  

 

RR has managed to piss off the local cops again.

This time in his new role as the parking authority director, continuing a feud that has been going on with him since he was put out of the department.

He apparently ordered his staff to ticket the private vehicles of local cops, which historically have used 60th street when parking for work.

Since RR is connected to The Virgin Mayor, this further isolates anyone associated with the mayor, including her.

This almost guarantees the police will work against the mayor if there is a recall election.

I can’t tell for certain where she stands with RR. (I’m desperately hoping he’s not the married man she has been plagued with over the last few months), although the Small Man called RR her “protector,” a strong-armed thug she can rely on in a tight place.

It is impossible to say for certain what her relationship is with RR, although she’s clearly sided with him in his attempt to get his job back as a cop.

She’s the one that puzzled half the county when she still worked in our office and insisted that RR’s name be placed high up in our annual power list, this coming only two months after starting to work with us, further suggesting how tied together they were from the beginning.

RR became her principle source when reporting on the Virgin Mayor’s legal problems, even though RR professed to be the Virgin Mayor’s ally.

It was almost as if RR was building up her status with us for when he later wanted to go after the congressman.

And I’m still more than a little alarmed by the fact that she started secretly texting me the same day RR started to send me emails as a confidential informant.

I tend not to believe in coincidences.

All this comes at a time when she is struggling romantically, and financially.

I’m told she is in negotiation to get a substantial raise, perhaps as much as $20,000 more than her starting salary. While she claimed the Virgin Mayor once hit on her, I doubt he’s the one she’s negotiating with.

My best guess would be Joey D, making me wonder if he’s the romantic interest. I hope not. He’s nearly as sleazy as RR is.

Still, she lists herself as the Virgin Mayor’s “confidential secretary,” something thick with possible inuendo.

Regardless of how she trickles up, she’s just about reached the top of that little world, and I expect she will eventually need to move on.

I’m told Joey D is planning to move south to the town where I cover, and reports suggests he intends to bring her with him.

This would be a disaster for me, and more reason for me to plead my case with management to get another beat where I do not have to encounter her, even by accident.

 

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A dangling conversation April 24, 2013

  

 

Glancing back at the poems I posted and she posted over the last month or so, I find almost no connection – with one exception, which I go into here shortly.

This is probably because of my cyber nanny and my need not to post things that my cyber nanny thinks will get me in trouble – or worse, inspire a real conversation.

My nanny refuses to believe me that there is not a snow ball’s chance in hell that she will ever talk to me again. I have kept my theory about possible poetry communication away from Cyber Nanny, who would make me stop posting entirely.

While I have snuck through a few poems under my nanny’s nose or written romantic poems that seem innocuous, but had a subtle message of their own, most of these would not have qualified as “a conversation starter) though my poetry notebooks are clearly responsive to her works, which is why they are unlikely to ever see the light of day (much as this journal won’t.)

Gauging from what I found in my limited research, my nanny need not worry about my poetry influencing here – at least, not in the collection I looked at, and if my nanny continues to censor me the way she has been, I do not expect any such exchange in the future – except by pure coincidence or some act of god through my unconscious, a perilous enterprise all of its own.

I can’t find over the last two months any example of call and response between me and her, and for the most part, I have been posting – to quote Paul McCartney – silly love poem, designed to keep my west coast nanny from scolding me.

Nothing I have posted under that scrunty rises any where near to the quality and complexity of her poems, deep meaning of poems she posts as she struggles in the midst of a serious romantic crisis (f my conclusions about her poems over the last month or so are correct, all of which likely talking to and about the same man.)

My poems are superficial at best (in other words, safe to post); hers are full of intense passion, desperation and painful truths.

If she is communicating, it is not part of any conversation with me (to think otherwise would be folly) and for the most part, her poem seems to be pleas to a man who owns her heart.

How she comes out in the end of all this, who can say?

The feeling she conveys is of growing distance between herself and the man she loves. He seems ready to move on without her, and each of her more recent poems seems to be an attempt to bring him back.  There is a bit of a roller coaster effect in this as she tries this ploy or that to influence him, trying some new plot after the previous plot failed.

I will likely keep posting silly love poems, partly to satisfy my nanny, but also not to send any mixed signals which she might mistake as a comment aimed at her to which she might actually react – or which she might actually use against me when her pain turns to rage and she seeks out someone else to take it all out on.

I am extremely grateful for the distance we have put between us (as opposed to the stupidity I engaged in last summer), although I feel intense sympathy for her and her current predicament.

But like the vampire-like voyeur I have become, I cannot look away or stop following her life story through her postings.

I mentioned earlier in his journal entry that there might be one exception in which something I wrote may have inspired something she posted,

This involved the poems I wrote in reaction to her Blake poem, a kind of juvenile showing off I couldn’t resist. Looking back, I wonder if the poem she posted after mine was in fact a response

Most likely not. But there are some similarities.

I still believe my initial analysis I wrote a month ago is accurate  --she writing the poem to her lover who is lying beside her in bed with the sunlight through the window onto their intermingled bodies.

My poem was written in ten verses to match Blakes series of poems. Her poem was largely one long single verse.

Her poem and mine both open with a similar phrase.

“The songs we hear inside our heads are not the ones we take to bed,” my poem says.

“Living inside my head to survive the outside of it has become so much apart of me until you sat in the bed beside me,” she wrote in hers.

My poem compares night to death and the dread of waking in the morning, and the desperate need for hope.

In her poem, she basks in the sunlight through the window with his body against her. She can feel his breathing.

My poem says: “the sun bakes through the sky, I think of all that’s in your eyes… and breathes out more than a sigh.”

She gets advice to stop filling the outside spaces with words because it makes her miss the moment of calm and quiet. The gift of two people in a room in the sun.”

In my poem, the wind howls outside the window, fading images of something still lingering a touch of tenderness, all pleasure out of my consciousness.”

None of this prove anything, of course, more than a coincidental similarity in language use.

It could be seen as a bit of one-man-upmanship as she reshapes language that I use (although her poems come off as far superior to mind and may be showing me just how much better her understanding of Blake is than mine) or perhaps (and this would be a big stretch of the imagination) she really is sending a message, a status report of how she is doing and how very happy she is with her new man.

Of course, my fantasy plays havoc with my common sense, making me wish for a connection I know is not there.

 

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Trading pride for love April 23, 2013

  

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In her first poetry post in a week, she continues her sad theme of love at risk, distance and desperation.

 This is a particularly painful read, depicting someone who sees the love of her life slipping through her fingers and she is helpless to stop it.

Perhaps in the distant past, in poetry long removed from the web, she may have expressed such anguish. But while she has expressed pain, anger and other emotions in her poetry over the last year and a half, none rises to the level of desperation as this poem does.

This despair is so poignant, I can’t help but sympathize.

I’ve been where she is and reading her poem brought it all back – only in my case, I was the cause of my romantic demise, where she appears to be someone who doesn’t have control of the situation.

Each of her last few poems has depicted a love affair that is moving beyond her grasp, although this latest says this literally, saying how helpless she is in this matter, and how she has to leave it all in his hands to save the romance or not.

It is not clear from the tone of the poem if he will. In fact, she seems to have her doubts. This is why she is making this last-ditch effort to convince him their love is worth saving.

“I place it in your hands, all of it,” she writes.

Then, she gives a possible clue as to who he might be when she uses the word “midweight,” a boxing term.

This may also give a clue as to where and when she met him since one of her last published pieces for us was in one of our magazines, in which she did a feature on a local boxing gym. I recall how great she looked with her boxing gloves on and standing in the midst of very powerful men. Apparently, one of them was struck in the same way and struck up a conversation that eventually led to romance.

The term also plays into the concept of conflict, and the perception of throwing in the towel, a boxing term for surrendering. She is admitting defeat, awarding him a victory in the bout of love.

She is stepping back, scared, holding her breath as to the outcome, something she clearly has done before. So much so that it has become normal for her to hold her breath and wait for something, if not the intensity of this love, then of other things in her life.

The poem suggests and even greater degree of separation than in the previous poems, as she watches her lover grow rather away, more remote, perhaps just beyond her finger tips, the passion she felt at the beginning, tried to keep contained in head, acted upon and has since become a mere “idea” and he appears not to be in the same physical space, “the idea of you, and not the truth.”

She is giving up the decision making to him, “into those hands there and not there.” He is still in her life, but barely, and she no longer has control over what might happen next and she must trust him to make the right choice, to trust him that he will still b e there to hold her up in a relationship that she is describing as “inadvertently coveted.”

This brings back to the love affair of the mind, when she questioned if she should pursue it in reality even though she knew it would destroy his world, as it ultimately came close to doing, and later, when it she was faced with a choice of joining him as a couple or keeping her own identity she ultimately chose herself, a decision she clearly still regrets, especially now as he grows more and more remote and she is helpless to bring him back. He must choose to return or not.

She can do nothing else.

She describes her state as “mid fall” and then gives him an offer, saying he will benefit from her descent if only he will save her. She is humbling herself before him, a reversal from her previous position when she chose “I” over “We.” She is casting her ego aside in order to retain love, and for someone who is as talented as she is, and desirable, not to mention ambitious, this is a remarkable move.

She clearly shows the depth of emotions she is capable of, and a deep, passionate love for someone.

And yet, this may well have come too late.

He may not feel the same way as she does.

Her use of “hands” signifies a number of possible meanings, such as holding her heart in his hands – possibly boxer’s hands, hands that are like a safety net she needs to catch her when she falls.

His hands are strong hands, echoing the “mid weight” description of them from the first verse, they are able hands, which may or may not be there in her time of need.

One can easily see her as a petitioner, carrying her bundle of concerns and humbly offering them to some powerful figure.

“I place it in your hands… and step back frightened,” she writes.

She holds her breath as she awaits his verdict.

She gives “all of it “to him “if only the idea of him” and “not the truth.”

Truth is one of the major elements of all of her poetry, or as she once wrote and I misread, tearing down to the bone of it (or something like that).

What truth means here remains a bit opaque in that she might also be surrendering what she knows to be “right and true” in order to appease her heart.

The poem does not say how he responds but leaves the reader hanging with the question as to if he will save her or not.

“There is nothing else,” she write, and offers this surrender, this falling from her perch as a victory for him, he will bear her and benefit.

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Hopping off the gravy train April 20, 2013

  

 

 

Things only get worse for her as the Virgin Mayor is expected to face additional federal charges and the court has refused to delay the trial.

The legal circus starts on May 14, and according to the former mayor, the trial is expected to last ten days to two weeks, after which many believe the Virgin Mayor will be forced to resign to make way for a special election.

There seems to be some dispute over whether or not the trial was delayed, but not about the additional charges.

Politiker claims he was charged with conspiracy, something the feds held back, hoping to use it to get the mayor to plead guilty to the original charges.

My sources claim they would not have brought the additional charges if he had cooperated. But the whole thing smells, and I suspect the feds may actually believe the mayor might get off after all.

Regardless of what happens, all of this has to have rattled everybody connected with the mayor, perhaps souring the lovefest she claimed about town hall in her recent Facebook posting.

Nerves have to be frayed and tempers short. While the same group of insiders will still keep control for a short time if the mayor is forced to step down, they fear their time is short, even if he wins the case – the mayor’s enemies will use the case against him, maybe even mount a recall.

She must know this, too, and perhaps is putting on a happy face with all that love stuff she’s been spouting on Facebook. This also comes when she is struggling in her personal life, as the man she loves seems to be creating more and more distance between them.

It can’t be easy being her these days.

Still, struggling inside and out, she has all the natural resources to survive, working in her role as a good foot soldier until she gets her chance to rise up in the ranks. She might even be able to survive the Virgin Mayor’s downfall by attaching herself to the new regime. I don’t know how much she is really aligned with the Virgin Mayor or whether she is just along for the ride. If the latter, then she can hop off the gravy train before it crashes into a brick wall.

I actually hope she does get off at the right stop.

 

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Being human April 20, 2013

  

 

As a caveat to yesterday’s post, I have to wonder how much she really believes she is part of a group when most of the photos she posts are of herself.

I’m not saying I mind this. I do not. From the beginning of this sorted affair, I have found myself mesmerized by images of her.

Early on, I found her daily photo Facebook photos so distracting that I actually defriended her twice. She was insulted naturally, especially when I could not fully explain why I did it. I also frequently erased the photos she sent me via the phone for the same reasons.

Something about the way she looked and still does compelled a reaction that I was not completely comfortable with, a loss of control, and the sense that she could command anything from me she wanted.

And I hate being out of control.

She does post group shots with her in their midst, and perhaps it is only my prejudice that draws my attention to her even when she is part of the crowd.

While she has no elected position in the city where she works, at public commission meetings she sits in the front row, as if making sure all the important people there see her – making me wonder if they are as mesmerized by her as I was a year ago.

She has a remarkable power over people – especially men – yet has yet to capitalize on it.

Perhaps, she learned this way back when from that lady on the cruise or knew it well before that, struggling to make it work for her advantage.

But her recent poetry indicates that even at her most manipulative, even when she is utterly sincere and completely consumed by love, she can sometimes be as powerless as those men who follow behind her – something that shocks me somewhat since before this, before the most recent batch of poems, I had envisioned her as immune, a remote and powerful queen of the night who could get whatever and whomever she wanted simply by nodding her head.

It is painful to watch her suffer, and yet somewhere deeper inside my brain, I find at least a little satisfaction in learning she is human after all.

 

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Just a face in the crowd? April 19, 2013

  

An off the cuff response to a comment to her latest photo posted on Facebook may supply a bit of information about her motivation, helping to fill in some of the gaps her personality profile.

She cropped her picture out of a group shot in the office to use as her profile picture. When several family members commented on how pretty she looked, she responded that it’s easy to look pretty when she is surrounded by love.

By implication, she is saying that the people around her are offering her protection and love.

This is an odd comment considering the fact that mayor’s office is known for its internal conflicts, back biting and office politics.

As savvy as she is, she is also naïve. And tends to become a true believer, much as she sounded when I spoke to her on the phone last fall about RR.

Whether he current faith is a carry-over from back then or not, I can’t say.

More than once over the last few months, she has made it clear that she sees herself as a good soldier in a good cause, something she seemed also to reflect when working in our office.

She always starts out that way, and then seeks to trickle up, and to find a position of authority, something she has only particularly accomplished in the mayor’s office, although it is clear she may never get the position of power she believes she deserves.

My best guess is that she has been allowed access to the inner sanctum, and does their bidding – digging up dirt on political enemies and such, while also serving as the photographer and other roles.

But there is a glass ceiling – not based on her gender, but on the fact that those who have power covet it, and she may not be able to easily rise up through the ranks as she had in other places where the internal mechanisms were much simpler.

She is one of the group, but has yet to rise above it.

At our office, I was a little scared that she might end up my boss after she managed to trickle up. But she was forced out by The Small Man and others before she could accomplish that.

(I still wonder how life might have turned out at our office had she become the boss, and what tasks she would assign me as punishment for having offended her during her rise to power).

While she seems to paint a picture of a perfect world, and apparently is willing to do just about anything to maintain her place in it, ultimately it is an illusion, because she really doesn’t want just to be one of the boys (or girls as the case may be), but to be someone of distinction (which she probably deserves, being smart, beautiful and clever).

As I have said before, there is not room for her at the top in that world. She is may be savvy enough to survive, may even have an aspect of ruthlessness needed, but ultimately, she’s not the kind of snake that thrives in such a world, and if she wishes to get distinction, she will have to move on to some world where she will find an easier way to trickle up.

 

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Leaping from a sinking ship April 17, 2013

  

The public safety director in her town is leaving. This may be both good news and bad news for her, since he’s the man to whom she gave information about her stalker from Brooklyn and possibly others, and someone who frequently commented on her Facebook postings. His leaving leaves her with one less supporter in an ever-changing political landscape.

The good news – if she is still connected to RR – is that RR is rumored to possibly get the post.

My sources claim the public safety director could no longer handle the pressure. He’s a nervous kind of man, who apparently struggles when it comes to making decisions.

One of the freeholders, who is very close to him, claims the public safety director is a nervous wreck, but can’t explain why.

“He’s in with sharks,” the freeholder said. “He’s got balls, but he’s not educated.”

Others call him “nice” but not smart.

“He’s gotten in over his head,” the freeholder said. “He told me he couldn’t take it anymore.”

The mayor and those close to him have asked the public safety director to selectively enforce the law.

“He has too many ethics to do that,” the freeholder said. “He can’t take what they are asking him to do.”

Married with three kids, the public safety director was appointed just about the same time she started to work for our office, part of a duel arrangement that had him sharing power with one of the police captains.

“I told him that having two people sharing power is crazy,” the freeholder said. “He asked me to serve as his deputy director. I wanted no part of that. I knew it couldn’t last.”

And as it turned out, it didn’t. Eventually, he became sole public safety director, and her close friend, even though she then still worked in our office.

In some ways, he was perfect for her, someone in authority to whom she could turn for support whenever she felt threatened – and apparently gave him significant amounts of her correspondence with her so-called stalkers, for him to keep and later use if necessary.

With his leaving, she loses a valuable resource, someone even RR can’t replace  -- a good man with ethics, who has shielded her and perhaps some of her activities. (It’s hard to tell what else she used him for although the timing of his leaving also comes at a time when her lover is distancing himself for her, begging me to wonder if he was that lover – although I suspect not.)

He is not a rat jumping ship, but a good man fleeing a ship full of rats.

Although she remains and appears to be developing real skills at self-preservation, he would never see her as a rat, and neither do I.

 

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Is it or is it not a conversation? April 16, 2013

Setting aside the analysis of her poem I already did (and believe to be an accurate interpretation), I’ll compare similarities between my poem about Tygrrr and her Tiger poem, speculating on whether or not her poem was a response to mine.

Both poems have a one word title, mine is “Void” hers is “Spark.”

My poem has a dedication to Tygrrr. Her poems opens with the word “Tiger” in the first line a variation on Blake’s classic.

My poem opens with the question as to where or not cats (animals in general) have souls or are they somehow protected by the souls of their human masters, protected against the furies of eternity..

Her poem follows the pattern of Blake of a tiger burning in the onset of the night, which carries with her “all its might,” and the struggle leaves its “soul” enlightened.

My poem asks if the creature I pray for lives on in some other fashion or is its existence what we see and feel in this world.

Her poems says that after some time of darkness a spark appears, a light that while frightening bodes for a better and continued fight.

Life, she says, continued to support her inability to fade or allow her to give into her pessimism.

My poem asks if we have done enough in life to fill the void these creatures face from then on, alone.

Placed side by side, her poem could be seen as a response to mine as if to say that even in the darkest hour, hope prevails, and life continues to bestow strength on those who survive the dark of night.

Was hers a response?

Most likely not, and yet, mine was the first serious poem I had posted that was not part of the Cyber Nanny misinformation campaign, something she might well have found she could sink her teeth into, even though as my analysis of the poem posted earlier this month, shows a totally different meaning, a personal meaning, part of her struggle to fulfill her destiny and retain her lover.

 

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Cyber nanny strikes again April 15, 2013

Okay, I lied.

And you know things are bad when I lie in a journal that nobody is meant to read but me.

Not all of what I post is unconsciously addressed at her.

Some is very conscious, perhaps sending a message, perhaps just because I can’t help having real feeling when I write poetry (even the superficial and silly romantic stuff).

Maybe I’m fortunate in having my west coast guardian angel (my cyber nanny) looking over my shoulder to keep me from making a bigger fool of myself than I already have.

This cyber nanny has been caring for me almost from the very beginning last spring, scolding me each time I said or did something stupid, most of all when I posted anything that seemed to provoke a response.

Her scolding came fast and furious last May through August, telling me which poems she believed I should not have posted, warning me against make a bad situation worse.

Some poems set my angel off more than others, and few more than the poem “It doesn’t get any better than this,” which was an extremely positive poem. I suspect my nanny doesn’t want me to fall into a trance, attracted to some inner meaning expressed in her posts.

Sometimes, I manage to slip a poem passed my angel, but for the most part, I put up “safe” poems that appear to have nothing to do with her and so appease my nanny.

And these non-related poems were designed to throw off anyone else who might be reading them for clues or build a case against me.

But few poems are created completely consciously, and so even these most safe poems risk exposing some inner feelings not completely intended by the poet.

So, not being completely aware of my own posting impact, it is extremely difficult to determine what is a reaction in her posts, and what is merely coincidence.

Those references were much clearer last spring and over the summer, than since fall, when early on she appeared add a few nasty tidbits into poems that seemed to focus on other subjects. These seemed even more sparce after her sudden resignation from our office

As the year concluded such references grew less and less frequent (if not completely gone) bearing no apparent relation to me (though I sometimes fantasize she is giving a progress report to me and the rest of her fans in the internet ether).

I have started to look back at the last month or so, finding only a few possible coincidences that might be mistaken for responses, suggesting that any attempt to read her work as a response may be self-delusion after all.

And yet, there are moments when there seems to be a stronger connection than mere coincidence.

As pointed out in yesterday’s journal, late last year when I posted something about my favor cat dying, she posted pictures of her cats on her Facebook page.

Earlier this month, when I posted a poem about another of my cats dying, Tygrrr, she posted a very powerful poem using William Blake’s Tiger poem for its structure.

In a desperate attempt to show off, I responded to her Tiger poem (sneaking it passed my cyber nanny) a collection that parodies Blake’s “Songs of Innocence.”

This was pure ego gratification since my honest reaction to her poems remains locked up in this journal or in the pages of my poetry journal (that would give my cyber nanny a heart attack if I dared post from these.)

Since the beginning of the year, most of her posts appear to be focused on the rise and fall of a relationship she’s having with a married man, a brilliant but painful read I have analyzed here, and reacted to in the pages of my poetry journal, but posted almost nothing about – so giving her nothing to react to)

I do have to be very careful about what I post  -- not because of my cyber nanny but because if she is reacting, I do not want her reacting to pieces that I don’t consider relevant. I’m tempted to post my poetry journal but know that would alienate my well meaning cyber nanny, who is merely, trying to protect me, not only from her, but also from my own worst instincts.

 

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