(For some reason, she removed this poem from her site not long after she posted it, raising questions in my mind as to what significance it had. All the previous poems she removed tended to reveal something she did not want exposed. But this poem seemed to reflect an ongoing struggle, and not a particular secret unless I miss something when I reread it.)
This rush of mostly sad poems started after her brilliant success with the women’s event, and that amazing trio of lust/love poems, written about a married man she sought to get involved in and apparently was successful in doing so, but not without a cost.
These swings of fortune or misfortune strongly affect the mood of her poems. Her amazingly seductive poems were quickly followed by poems of – if not despair then – depression, a kind of revaluation of the life, and the two in late March were of this latter kind.
Her poem draws on a famous quote by Fredrich Nietzsche and repeats the line throughout the poem: When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we had conquered long ago.”
As in the original, she uses “we” though it is clear she means herself but goes on in greater detail about what the original quote must have meant, about how weariness causes her to drop her defenses.
These are barriers she has constructed painfully over time. Now, ghosts she thought she’d gotten rid of haunt her again.
She doesn’t sleep, she wanders around in a trance “numbed to the outside but tortured within.”
Dreams are not dreams, but images singed into the soul and preoccupies her mind.
She can’t look away from them.
She can’t rest, she keeps plodding on, back into the past to relive these things once thought to be forgotten.
This may simply be a repetition of a pattern of her life or even someone cropping up from the past to haunt her (It’s not me), but she is clearly reliving old agonies, and is struggling to find a way to get off the treadmill so she doesn’t have to deal with the same situation over and over again.
The poem comes at a time when she had high hopes for a relationship which withered away, and perhaps this poem reflects similar situations in the past, and the dread of having to dredge up those old feelings. But she can’t stop. She can’t sleep. She travels through it all in a daze.
There is no way to know the particulars, whether this is solely personal or is a combination of being trapped in a job that has no future. But it clearly builds on a series of poems showing she is unhappy and maybe even desperate to escape the circle.
Since she has displayed painful resilience in the past, it is not hard to imagine her reinventing herself again, but each cycle is full of pain and the process difficult.
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