Not to beat a dead horse, but the trickle up poem deserves as much attention as the fair/unfair poem, partly because both poems say largely the same thing.
Life is unfair, and playing by rules is pointless because nobody else is.
Trickle up, however, suggests that she once believed differently, and assumed that the illusion of a trickle-down society (as proposed by President Reagan in the 1980s) actually worked. If you have talent, work hard enough, you will by your merit achieve – something she completely abandoned in her fair-unfair poem and goes even further in this poem. She is saying that what she expected didn’t happen and she wound up as something else.
She must accept what she has become and use what talents she has (in every sense of the word) to force herself upstream, Salmon-like, alluding with her dividing the word unadulterated into un ADULT- erated to suggest no moral ambiguity.
This is what she is, see? So, accept it.
The speaker of the poem is someone who was clearly naïve to once have had faith in the system as fair, but has learned better, and has become something other than what she might have foreseen, someone through a series of hard knocks learned to survive and perhaps thrive, meeting her needs with “an upsurge” and “frankly, un-ADULT – erated.”
The main question is just who she is speaking to. It has to be someone who has suspected the truth about her, someone judgmental (as indicated in the fair-unfair poem) and someone she feels the need to explain why she is the way she is.
Coming after fair/unfair, the scribe poem and several other bitter poems, I suspect this might be aimed at me. But it is possible, she is talking to someone else who has reached the same conclusions I have, and she needs to make it clear, she once believed merit and talent could bring her what she needs, but now, she knows better, and must embrace the world as it is, thus making however bitter the lemonade from the lemons life has given her.
The poem is full of resignation, less confessional or even defiant than the fair/unfair poem, although there is a sense of defiance in the subtext saying: “This is how I am, whether you like it or not.”
A brief, but brilliant poem, it is structured on two extremely short verses, the first of which said trickle down society has turned her into what she has become, even though it is not what she intended. The second verse says she has decided to meet fate head on, making the best of a bad situation, using what god given talents she has in a world dominated by powerful people.
Implied by not said in this poem is the fact that those she uses to get ahead are in their own right corrupt, and if they were so morally superior, they would not be vulnerable to her seductions.
A legitimate argument.
This is so blatantly honest, I understand why the poem made a brief appearance earlier, and I suspect, she will not keep it up on her blog long because someone else might be smart enough to put two and two together.
I don’t know why I should feel so sad reading this and the other poems. This is how life works, even if I’m not willing to admit or embrace it.
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