I won’t pretend to understand what prompts her changes of mood and tone from poem to poem, and if any of it really concerns me at all.
Perhaps there is legitimate personal confusion, since she tends to use her poems to send messages that she might otherwise fear to send by other means.
Sometimes, I think she is spinning a web, although it is also beyond me what she expects to catch in it when she does.
She seems to have hunkered down in her new job, and appears to believe she is part of the inner political circle – and yet as the poem I wrote about yesterday, there seems to be a political divide that keeps her from being with the person she loves.
The mentioning of politics in that poem appears to indicate she has taken a side perhaps within an insider dispute.
This makes me wonder once again whether or not her moves inside our office and outside were politically orchestrated from the start, or that her actions regarding us may have been more or less controlled by those same forces to whom she must answer now.
And it may be that the only place she feels comfortable enough talking freely – even if vaguely at times – is in her poetry – perhaps even converse with her arch enemy, me. This may well be a venue where she can maintain control when all other venues are closed to her or monitored.
Circumstances within her world may be the cause of her poetry mood swings from rage to regret, or from the struggle to maintain control of her own life. She swings from nice to rage back to too nice again, this last even more saccharine than the batch of poems prior to it, and perhaps the essential takeaway from all this is her belief that some people (especially me) don’t understand her.
For a long time (and still) I was uncertain if any of these poems were directed at me.
I keep hoping it’s not the case – while at the same time, still vague hope she is communicating with me (my pathetic ego again). As written about in previous journal entries, the only poems I am certain were directed at me came last summer, and since then my wishful thinking or perhaps paranoia may interpret some as – such as the scribe poem.
From what I can gather from her most recent Facebook postings, she is still connected to members of the RR family, who like RR all have jobs with the town.
As much as I believe her poems are a reflection of her true feelings, I distrust her need to be so cryptic, as if she needs to say things, but doesn’t want just anybody to get what exactly she has to say.
Some of it is so subtle that nobody could use it in any way against her such as the trickle up poem or the change of priority poem of 2003.
Her more recent liberation poem about right and wrong, fair and unfair, finally came out of the closet, and yet I get the feeling this might have scared her a bit, even though she did not remove it from her blog the way she has other poems she might have seen as too revealing.
Of course, she is clever enough to use her poetry to push buttons to get reactions from people—including me, which is one of the reasons I keep a separate poetry journal that allows me to react, but which I neve post (with rare exceptions if I can sneak one or two passed by cyber nanny), a degree of separation that I lacked early on when I had knee jerk reactions to some of her poems.
I like the fact that she has opened up in her poetry more, even though I’m not certain how long it will last – and even if they have nothing to do with me.
If they are in some ways directed at me, then it is clear that water has not passed under this bridge fast enough and old wounds have not yet even started to heal, and I need to create even greater distance between us (even though I have not seen her or even talked to her since she left our office last October).
I suspect some of the poems are at least in part directed at me as it the scribe poem. But fortunately, most of her poems appear to be about other people, and perhaps if I remain “clever and elusive” enough, we can get to a point where none of her poems are pointed in my direction. Time will only tell.
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