I got a call from a guy in Union City asking for my wife. This came after I posted a bunch of photographs from the waterfront along the northern portion of the county.
It seems she thinks these photographs somehow equate to stalking, or apparently, is trying to convince some of her male friends of it.
I get the feeling nobody actually believes her – not even the former public safety director who was her close ally for a time.
This is part of the reason why I suspect some of her poems may be trying to provoke me into a reaction, to get the “clever and elusive” character to show his hand so that she can pounce. Last fall, she seemed to insert a line or two in several poems that seemed provocative. The scribe poem and one or two later poems also appear to follow in that vein.
Whether any of this is true or not, I can’t tell.
But her remarkably honesty in the most recent poems startles me, yet not enough to openly respond, even if my cyber nanny would allow it.
I would discredit myself if I tried, giving into the perception that she apparently wants to create.
Maybe the call from the guy in Union City was absolutely innocent. But these days, I suspect everything, especially when the owner of my company checks my computers at work, and I spend a lot of time avoiding him when I can.
Her poems tend to be all over the place when it comes to mood, some clearly angry, while others seem way too nice, although I strongly suspect none of the nice poems are aimed at me – and if they were, I would suspect her of spinning me the way she did early one when she treated me like her mentor (only to have me replaced by our temporary boss as short time later.)
While I do not dispute some of the facts as she laid them out in her last few poems, I also remember her rage when I somehow broke out of the spell she seemed to cast, as if she was desperate back then to keep me controlled.
Again, this may well be my imagination.
The temporary boss is much more sympathetic towards her, feeling great sympathy for her pain, and I can’t be sure if he is under a spell, or if he sees her more clearly than I do.
I tend to believe her rage more than I do her kindness, although as of late, after having read so many of her poems, I have a somewhat better understanding of the turmoil she is going through, the struggle to get what she thinks she deserves, and how unfair life seems each time this gets snatched out from her grasp.
What I originally saw as manipulation appears to be a survival mechanism.
She must do what she does, or she gets run over, with trickling up or changing priorities among the tools she uses just to keep ahead of some real or imagined impending doom.
Her ability to shock people with her sexuality still shocks me, whether it is the sexual innuendo she sometimes alluded to at our staff meetings – the old lady at the senior center looking for a man to fuck or the playwright who wrote about raping a pizza man.
Most of her stories are pretty straight – well-crafted work that I still read from time to time (looking for inspiration for my own stories).
She seems less determined to resort to shock in her poetry, although her talk about her wanton nature shocked me, not because it was a revelation, but because she was so willing to admit it.
Perhaps she hoped such a true confession would cause me to respond, and in my own way, I did, carefully, never obviously, and under the radar of my cyber nanny, yet not so openly as to provide her the proof she needs to validate her claims about me.
The email exchange on her birthday last summer was a mistake, one that I’ve avoided making ever since, and won’t make again.
I thought I was being clever when I should have just buried my head in the sand and let her do whatever she wanted to do since nothing she has done since has affected me positively or negatively – although I am at times moved by her poetry, and her music.
If anything, I’ve gone deeper underground, to become even more clever and illusive, to avoid anything that remotely smacks of response.
But if rumor is right (and GA the blogger thinks they are), then her involvement in Hometown has the potential to create problems as she uses her talents on behalf of the candidate R, putting her in the odd position of being on the same time as the Neighboring Mayor who she hates, and who hates her.
I’m not sure of what transpired between those two, but it strikes me as person, as if perhaps the mayor hit on her at one point (perhaps went further than that) and then moved on, inspiring her to seek out ways to get even with him. Her tale about his getting the 16-year-old girl pregnant then hiding her in the Housing Authority still strikes me as bizarre.
I’ve sent all the messages, covert or not, I intend to send, although she may well read into my column or my poetry things I never intended. Still a lack of response is a response, and it must infuriate her to wonder what I am up to when I appear to be up to nothing.
“You won’t get me,” she wrote in one of her poems, which can be taken on several levels, but also possibly as a sign of her frustration.
In not responding, I feel the same lack of power that I have had since the beginning.
I do react, but in my journal and my poetry journal, not in my public posts. I do not want to feed her hatred, and living freely, still employed, and seemingly carefree appears to be more revenge than anything I would respond with in print.
She might find it hard to believe (considering some of the things that she has posted in her poems), but I don’t want to see her fail.
I’m more interested in my own survival.
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