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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