My West Coast cyber nanny got back to me after reading my posts and her posts, and concluded her poems are not a response to mine.
For the most part I believe my cyber nanny is right. Most of the details of most of the poems she’s posted since late last year do not fit me at all.
But there are rare exceptions which I have detailed in this journal, and raised questions about differing interpretations from those I wrote first, such as some of the poems that came after her affair with the married man ended.
I’m still reexamining some of her poems with the eye of finding perhaps a broader interpretation of their meaning.
I, of course, still live with the somewhat naïve fantasy that she is posting poems she knows I will read, as if conveying a vision of her inner life so I might come to understand her better.
Down deep, I know better. While she may be aware of my interest in her poetry, her motivation has nothing to do with me or my understanding, but the desperate need – as she put in it in her scribe poem – to try and document the absurdity that is her life.
I am even less inclined to believe that she posts things (some of which seem to point at me) as a means to provoke me into some foolish response (as what happened with her birthday last summer) in order to prove some point about me to the people around her.
Yet sometimes I feel she intentionally creates this duality, the possibility of multiple interpretations, not merely for artistic merit, but for deniability.
Consciously or not, her poems evoke images and feelings that may go beyond the circumstances she is describing, and may well be misread or perhaps even intentionally misdirected for reasons of her own.
So, what may seem like a response, may be merely something drawn out of our collective unconscious from which we all draw.
As much as she claims to not need love (she has her cats), she tends to create heroes out of those she is attracted to, building them up in her mind, and then growing disappointed when they fail to live up to her myth making – and for a brief moment in time, when we are all on the upswing, there is a commonality among us that could easily be mistaken, and an equal commonality in how we fail to achieve the heroic status she envisioned for us. So, a poem about any part of this up or down swing might seem relevant to us all, when she meant is in a most particular way about a most particular person.
We simply read into the poems what we most want to see.
I fervently want there to remain open a channel of communication, good or bad, angry or not, I therefore see her poems in that light – if not a response to what I post, then a kind of secret society of scribes who share their inner most feelings with each other through poetry.
In fact, most likely, she would be posting these poems in precisely the same way, if I did not exist.
I’m not the only one who appears to think this way. I recall a year ago when she talked about how her Brooklyn stalker had misinterpreted one of her poems, making it clear she is perfectly aware of her audience, even if they are no longer on speaking terms.
She knows we read her poems, and therefore like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, her knowing we are reading the poems subtly changes them, and perhaps consciously or unconsciously alters the content, responding without meaning to, which I believe she has done a number of times, despite what my cyber nanny says.
It is quite possible that some poems are aimed at me such as the scribe poem, while most or not, and some are response to something I’ve posted, even if unconsciously so.
This is also true about the poems I post, those in particular that I have snuck passed my cyber nanny with the deliberate intention of provoking a response. But she is so clever that when and if she responds, I can’t always be sure she is.
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