Love and marriage? June 14, 2013

  

 

She posted this poem about marriage during our month of so-called bliss, a year or so ago last April -- and like the poem with me as the one eyed pirate, she included a warning about who she is and what she wants and what she does not want. At the time, the poem appeared more or less innocuous though looking at it through the lens of a year and considering some of her other poems printed since this poem has a haunting quality.

In a later poem, posted last August she compared marriage to death saying she had bought the farm once, a harsh retrospect of her life after a bitter and brutal struggle with me over the previous summer.

yet this poem posted in April demonstrates that her view of marriage as a trap did not come out of that conflict. She seems to have been wary of the institution well before that, something of an irony considering the several of love poems she posted earlier this year and also explaining why she hesitated when her lover apparently offered to join her in that sacred union. As much in love as she appeared to be, she refused to give up her own identity, a philosophy penned in the poem from April 2012 when she seemed to prefer being the bride’s maid as opposed to the bride.

Playing off the old cliche about a bridesmaid never a bride she contemplates just who actually is better off in the end. While the concubine, the loyal supporters decked out in garish dresses do not get the attention or the presents, she asks what is behind their desire to become brides. She points out that the sacrificial lamb always wears white, and it is the troops in the trenches who earn their way fighting the good fight, making strides to change the times.

Wives after their brief honeymoon get to do laundry and the hard labor that comes as a result of marriage.

The poem of course is not merely about marriage but the concept of success as well, about those who get all the attention on their way to achieving their place in the world and she having not yet achieved these looks on envious the way a fox does when looking up at grapes hanging too high to reach and concluding that the grapes are probably sour.

Her need to get what she thinks she deserves in the world makes her question the key nature of success, how while she may be up to her neck in dirt and sweat the bride's glory is only momentary and soon falls into perhaps a more miserable fate.

The whole pageantry is like cheese in a rat trap once the rat devours the cheese the trap springs and she is forever caught in a life perhaps more miserable than any of the bridesmaids.

Success she concludes, is a dubious thing and perhaps not worth achieving, at least not in the way society paints it.

The poem leaves the question as to whether there is another way to achieve success to become the bride without being trapped in the life of perpetual servitude.

It is not a question she answers in this poem anyway

 

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One eyed jacks? June 13, 2013

  

 

I went back to the beginning, to the first poem I am certain was written about me or to me, a hopeful, perhaps too hopeful poem she posted a day or two after she started texting me in March 2012, telling me “I’m really into you.”

Since she later yanked down this poem from her blog when things grew tense between us, the poem must have said something important to her, and something she needed to take back, having – perhaps – exposed her inner sense and her motives too clearly.

I resurrect this poem at this time because it reveals some od her intentions at that time which I failed to grasp early on.

In some ways, this poem dispels some presumption that everything she did in regard to our office was calculating.

Or perhaps, gives evidence to the mixed motives and her inability to separate what she wanted professionally from what she needed personally.

Since she posted this so soon after we connected, I assume she did not expect for me to have read it immediately, and so, the question as to whether this poem is directly directed at me rather than just about me remains a question.

It certainly reads as if she intended for me to read it. Some lines are directly focused on med, or if not me, then the person she is talking about.

She opens the poem with the word “Finally,” repeated twice, and then in the third refrain, modified as “Final he”, and her she gives a tell-tale description.

“With that clandestine one-eyed four-dimensional stare.”

I wore an eye patch back then as I recovered from eye surgery.

Believing the poem is about me, I am also aware that she made assumptions about me and the poem hints at her being somewhat naive – I missed later during the depths of our conflicts.

She assumed that my “fourth-dimensional stare” could see A “into what it is we both need.”

This is the beginning and the end (the same thing, she says) “What it was and what it could be.”

And here, she lays out the caveat that could have/should have warned me about what was to come.

“Don’t fucking rescue me.”

 The implication is that someone like me might think she needs to be rescued, and that she has been through all this before, and is aware of exactly who she is and what she does. She goes on to assume that I will not pass judgement on her (as saving would imply.)

“But you won’t, I know,” she wrote.

At this point, her poem goes on to lay out a fundamental truth – and express an everlasting hope for the emerging relationship – including more than a suggested sexual relationship.

although I have a vision to see behind her mask, this still may not be the real her, but rather something I want for myself, which I – like some before me – assume as her real self. This implies the potential for something like love which may be seen as real, rather than merely lust.

She suggests that I should take as real what I see when I looking behind her “seething mask” and into her

“As in me,” she writes with strong sexual allusion, “or in me – thrust through a life time diatribe of convincing man after woman after man” that she is tough enough to take what I thrust at her, as what is not really here, but a projection of my own desire, want I want her to be.

This implies that we (man after woman after man etc.) see only what we wish her to be, and can’t see the real her (like a song from The Who’s rock opera – “can you see the real me, can ya?”

What these layers of meaning suggest is that I might never get to know the real her, or even what lies behind the seething mask, and like her lovers before this, I will see what I want to see rather than what is actually there, no matter how deeply I thrust into her.

The poem – not by her intention – suggests perceived vulnerability, of a damsel in distress men and some women paint her as, when she has tried her whole life to convince her lovers “I am tough enough to take what you thrust at me (who is not her, but a projection of our own desires for what we wish her to be, while perhaps mistakenly accepting what we finally see when we look passed the mask as real.

“However obscure and imprecise that might be,” she writes.

At this point in the poem, she draws back a little, taking a more positive outlook to admit that whatever happens between us is “nice, perhaps beyond belief.”

She said it was nice to rest in peace without having to die, endlessly.

Or to be reinvented based on what other people think they know about her, but don’t.

She speculates about the future – “Whatever that may be,” and said she is grateful and “semi-impatient” to see what is meant for me and her.

The poem attempts to foreshadow what she hopes will happen and sets the stage for extreme disappointment as I fail to live up to her best expectation, and far exceed her worst fears.

I was not prepared to fully appreciate the poem when she first posted it. So, I could not take heed to avoid the pitfalls implied in it, and only now, a year or so later, after having incurred her wrath and caused her great pad, do I realize how revealing the poem is, as much a confession as her poem about fair and unfair.

Yet, even now, after having read her poems, digested many, I still may lack the vision to see beyond her masks and may still see in her what I want or need her to be – something utterly sad, since I only now clearly realize what got lost, and how I managed to blow something very special.

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Trapped by her own ambition June 11, 2013

  

 

Truth be told, I haven’t a clue as to the inner workings of the Virgin Mayor’s office except for the handful of cutthroats that latched onto him when he unexpectedly won as mayor two years ago.

I am making the assumption that she operates in that venue in the same manner as she did in our office, and perhaps even in jobs prior to the one with us.

Her ability to trickle up in each institution seems to rely on keeping all the players involved in the dark.

She also seems to have worked her way up through three towns during her employment in our office, as well as through our administration – and had her plans at our office foiled at least in part by me.

 But also because of her unbridled ambition, and that of others, that eventually brought her into the unenviable position of having to rely on one primary source of power: the Virgin Mayor.

I can’t say who the married man is that she got involved with earlier this year and who she is still mourning the loss of, but most likely it is someone she works with, someone in a powerful position within the administration, and someone who has some say in some part over her fate.

I don’t think it’s RR. My best guess is that it is Joey D, a notorious womanizer in his own right.

“He like’s having pretty women around him all the time,” said one of the officials in the town I cover, who Joey D has been courting as to possibly get a position if this politician wins the election early next year.

Joey D apparently has also tried to broker a job for her in this new place, further suggesting a closer than just business relationship between the two.

I don’t know how many stepping stones it took for her to reach the Virgin Mayor -- RR was, no doubt, one of these – with Joey D possibly a side step.

While she claims there is a family-like atmosphere in the office where she works, her sudden rise to become so close to the Virgin Mayor has to have created more than a few enemies or at least pretend friends, who resent her for her success.

This was likely true in almost most of the jobs where she managed to trickle up, where she got involved with the boss and was bequeathed power other workers most likely did not think she deserved, she has become trapped in her own ambition, most evident with her chef friend, who had proven incompetent and forced her to seek a new structure in which to again begin her climb.

She seems to constantly find herself in a situation where she can’t get what she thought she would get.

As pointed out yesterday, her fate is tied to the mayor (unless she can sidestep to a new power grid). She is desperate to believe he will survive the charges against him because she has no other choice at the moment.

Now, she is trapped again.

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Not your stepping stone June 11, 2013

  

 

You have to wonder if she has trickled all the way up to the Virgin Mayor, what’s left for her?

I mean, where does she go from here when there is nobody beyond the mayor.

For a time, I suspected she may have gotten involved with the Neighboring Mayor – a much more powerful mayor than the Virgin Mayor is, and a powerful state senator as well.

If so, then things went sour for her a while ago, which may explain the bad feelings between them, and why she called him corrupt and why she spread rumors about his allegedly getting an underage girl pregnant and hiding her in a housing authority apartment.

Trickly up is apparently tricky business. It is one thing to latch onto a relatively inexperienced politician like the Virgin Mayor, and quite another when it comes to a truly powerful person like the Neighboring Mayor.

And this is made worse by the fact that nobody yet knows whether the Virgin Mayor will be forced to resign if his legal case goes badly.

Our former temporary boss claims the Virgin Mayor is trying to get Civil Service status for her, so she can’t be fired by the new mayor.

But personal secretary to the mayor is hardly a position recognized by the state as deserving Civil Service protection.

And although she filed the paperwork, it is likely she knows she can’t get it, and is perhaps scared to death that she will sink when the Virgin Mayor’s ship sinks.

She most likely feels the way she did when she discovered that the bar owner she worked for in New York was incompetent and that that she is once again trapped in a position without an easy exit.

She might have to latch on to someone else – perhaps Joey D – hoping that person can help her find a new stepping stone.

This, of course, has to be done quietly. And from what I gather from her activity in our office, she tends to work her magic in secret, not allowing one person she’s used in her climb to know that she has found another horse to ride.

This somewhat explains her intense reaction when I told her I had talked about her to our former Temporary boss, when he was still temporary boss.

I knew then, she had already moved on to him – and was intensely jealous about it. For some reason, her trickling up to the male owner bothered me less, perhaps because I considered our former Temporary boss someone I could trust and suspected she had seduced him with the old cub reporter trick she had used on me.

This lack of ability to trickle up in her current situation is why I believe she will get involved in the Hometown election, looking for more fertile ground to sew her seeds, and a new pecking order that does not end up with a mayor facing federal charges.

New ground with a new pecking order would also allow her once more to operate in stealth. She would not have an easy transition if people knew her game the way several key people in her current town do and might recognize her attempt to claw her way to the top (as I recognized last year when she moved on from me to our Temporary Boss and finally to the male owner).

This is risky business, of course, since there will be others in the Hometown election who will be competing with her for access to R if he’s elected.

But can she chance remaining where she is, risking that her source of power, the Virgin Mayor, could be brought down?

Most likely a new mayor would see her as excess baggage

She might not be able to trickle up to this mayor since most of the insiders in her current town are aware of her antics, and would no doubt do things to block her.

Besides, who ever replaces the Virgin Mayor will be someone the Neighboring Mayor will have a voice in choosing, and since the Neighboring Mayor doesn’t trust her, neither will the new mayor he selects.

Even if the Virgin Mayor survives his legal ordeal, her position is not much improved.

She has already trickled up as far in that circle as she can, and from what some insiders claim, most of those in the inner circle do not take her as seriously as she takes herself.

My guess is she’ll move on as soon as an opportunity presents itself, and the best opportunity currently, is the Hometown election.

 

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Ship wreck June 10, 2013

 

 

I keep going back to some of her older poems partly because they reflect clarity that her most angry poems lack.

I also like the fantasize that she is talking to me in some of these poems, even when I know the poems are not about me, a kind of progress report on her inner being only great poetry can provide, and even when some of the poems express deep emotional turmoil, like the “down” poem she posted last month.

The poem seems to sum up a love story that has been ongoing for months, where she clearly has lost herself, unable to steer her life in any direction, defining the intense sadness she feels over losing someone who might have become the love of her life.

It is a heart-wrenching poem, even when she manages to disguise some of the anguish in metaphor, and in the aftermath of the shipwreck of a romance, she seems lost at sea.

I’m tempted to translate this as a comment on her life in general and her inability to get what she set out to get, but it is clear this is a poem about watching someone she really wants to be with drift further and further away, even as she desperately seeks to clutch it – it slips out of her grasp.

The poem seems to define her life and her inability to control what happens. She is no longer steering towards some desired goal and doesn’t understand what is happening.

Again, I’m tempted to paint this in other terms, as if a comment on plans she’s made only to have them fall through – which in truth is what the poem is about, only it’s not about trickling up, but about her inability to hold on to what may well be true love.

In the poem, she says she has become conscious of time’s passing – while at the same time, time moves so slowly.

This possibly means that she sees herself as aging. She is about to turn 34 and may see this as her last opportunity to find the kind of love she wants.

Time can be agonizingly slow as well, especially at those moments when all hope seems gone.

She goes on to talk about how her life slips away from conscious control, perhaps habitual patterns that are ruled by unconscious desires, when it is clear that she has struggled most of her life to have control of the direction her life takes, but now it is “out of my fragile, weakened hands.”

This seems to revert back to something she said in an earlier love poem when she left the whole matter in his hands.

Now, there is a whole ocean between them as he drifts away.

Ocean also seems to serve as a metaphor for the vastness of life, too overwhelming for her to control, despite her staring it down, trying to envision its entirety when such is not possible, and she is soon overrun with the incoming ways, floating above herself – almost like an afterlife image.

“Floating above the swirling turbulent mass of liquid dream”

Again, she refers to time and her inability to control its pace, clinging to it as if clinging to driftwood, and the harder she clings, the more it slips from her grasp

She is pulled down by the undertow, unable to halt the inevitable, unable to breathe, only to wake up, confused as to who she is, who she and he were, and what they were to each other, all lost to the vastness of the sea, the liquid dreams, all she thought she knew lost in the “unforgiving, relentless sea,” all washed away, all that she thought was real is now far away.

Love like something on the horizon she knows she’ll never be able to reach.

This is a slightly different interpretation of this poem than I had when she first posted in in mid-May, but I’m still convinced this is about her failed romance, and how he and she have drifted apart, despite her best effort cling to hope it would not.

What she wants continues to evade her, and she is set adrift, having no control over who she is or where she is going. She certainly can’t get back to what she had before.

There is a deep thread of despair in all this. She had obviously made assumptions that turned out differently than she expected, or perhaps, relied on her lover to have the same depth of feeling for her as she clearly has for him, and now, life seems to lack meaning for her.

Her use of the sea as a metaphor has a number of implications as she stares out into the waves: love is out there somewhere, beyond her reach.

One would extend the metaphor slightly and claim she has been in a shipwreck and all she has left are the scattered, floating remains of the romance she once so intensely longed for, and yet when she clutches at these fragments, even then bob away from her the more desperately she grabs for them.

She seems to compare the affair to a dream from which one day she is abruptly woken. Was it real? Did it ever happen?

In an earlier poem, she talked about preserving her own identity, a decision that ultimately led to the dissolution of the romance – a choice in this poem she clearly regrets, because in the aftermath, she has lost a sense of who she is, and questions what exactly they had together in the first place.

I keep coming back to this poem because it seems to conclude the series of poems that started with her lust of him (and whether she should act on that lust) and continued through a point where she had to decide to surrender herself and her identity, and to a final scene of her watching her love drift far out into the sea beyond reach.

This poem also defies some assumptions about her – which painted her as a master manipulator, a black widow whose soul purpose is to trickle her way up to positions of power.

This poem shows she clearly can’t get the one thing she craves most out of life: true love.

 

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No stranger to Hometown June 9, 2013

 

She is no stranger to Hometown.

She lived here for a time before she got married and went out on tour.

She apparently worked as a bartender at some pub inland from the waterfront and the main drag.

It is unclear if this was while she still attended college in New York City, although clearly after her teaching gig upstate.

Hometown is very convenient for people seeking to further their careers in the big apple, a mere train or ferry away, and yet far cheaper than Manhattan rents, yet still allowing someone to feel they are part of the urban mix.

Since I worked out of the Hometown office back then, we might well have passed each other on the street. While I would have taken notice of her, I would not have remembered it a decade later when she took up a job with us.

She knew the social scene, while I spent almost no time in the pick up and fuck bars Hometown was famous for.

This knowledge of the scene – even a decade later – might make her quite useful to those power seeking to get R elected mayor, and they may well make full use of her talents for getting other people to do what she wants.

Since she left our office nearly six months ago, she is not nearly as useful to R as A is – since A actually worked the Hometown beat and brings to the lection fresher influence over the male owner, who apparently used A the way he did our poet, while paying both starvation wages in exchange for their favors.

What use R puts our poet to will likely involve the bar scene and socializing with people R needs for the election—although I would not put it passed R’s thugs to use other, harsher means of persuasion to get our owner to give R’s ticket better coverage.

GA, the Hometown blogger, believes we will see a very dirty election, and I agree with her, suspecting our poet will play a prominent role in it.

 

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If feels like starting over June 9, 2013

  

I trust almost nothing I hear about her, and only a portion of what she says about herself in her poetry.

This is not because I think she’s being dishonest when she puts pen to paper, but there are things she’s afraid to admit, even in the cryptic venue of verse.

In her most recent poem, she had taken a step back from her previous poem (in which she accepted fate) and seems to indicate that things are worsening for her.

She still seems to be in the Virgin Mayor’s camp but seems to suggest she might have to abandon him.

This may have to do with his legal troubles, or perhaps something beyond my resources to identify (an unexpected darkness) and she struggles once again to remain calm.

As much as her poem from Sunday seemed to put a positive spin on her surrendering to the inevitable, this most recent poem seems to say she’s still on the deck of a sinking ship with some new dark revelation making her lose faith as she plans her escape.

Yet, where does she leap?

All this comes at a time when she has managed to trickle her way into the Virgin Mayor’s brain trust, although it is still difficult to whom she has attached herself, and whether or not she still clings to hope and the man in her love poems earlier this year.

Trickling up doesn’t always get her where she wants, especially in that circle of scoundrels where it is every man and woman for his or herself.

You would think in a town as small as the Virgin Mayor’s town is, he would be the end of all of her aspirations, the top dog she can latch herself onto and let him take her for a ride. But in truth, there is no pyramid of power, only fiefdoms, with each of these flea-bitten scoundrels operating with his or her own sphere of influence, brought about by their connection to the mayor, of course, but not so much a matter of complete loyalty to him.

This is similar to the situation in our office where we have two owners at the top of the heap, and even though she apparently managed to trickle herself up into the good graces of our male owner, he was largely a fraud, someone who played top dog, but in reality, did very little to earn it.

He was always dumping his work on other people, then holding court in his office as if he really was important, while his female partner did most of the real work and held most of the real power – including power to give our poet a raise.

These two owners were constantly at each other’s throats. And while our poet friend managed to latch onto our male owner, who in his own right seemed to come after me, I had the good graces of our female owner, who tended to protect me.

It was her good graces that kept me employed after I informed them last summer that the poet had accused me of stalking her. Perhaps my five-page, single-spaced memo laying out the whole mess from what it started up to the point of my being accused helped give the female owner some insight into what her partner was going through as well.

Our poet got hired as a gesture of kindness by the Virgin Mayor. But it was also an opportunity for her to make gains, which she apparently did. But as with our office, her current situation has too many chiefs she needs to satisfy -- which is one reason why I think she is dipping her wick in the Hometown election, to help satisfy them as well as the mayor.

Her association with the Virgin Mayor gives her access into that small and exclusive club of power. But to stay there, she’ll have to prove herself worthy.

Still, while others in that circle have their own base of power, it isn’t quite the same as being mayor, and if he goes down in court, they will all have to seek life boats or start swimming.

The fact that they have “real” positions with legitimate duties gives them an advantage she does not have.

Each of them has come from some other place where they have a string of accomplishments, they can use to get new positions, where as almost all of her power resides with the Virgin Mayor. While she claims to be personal secretary to the mayor, and does one PR work for him, she is not the head honcho when it comes to public relations, and really has no previous government experience she can use to broker herself into another job.

This may be the reason why she allowed her PR boss to incorporate her in his campaign for R in the Hometown election. If R wins, our poet may get a job in Hometown, a huge step up from where she currently is.

I’m also told Joey D is looking to jump ship, has made inquiries in the town I cover and has asked to bring our poet with him – giving her a foot in the door of yet another municipal government. But wherever she ends up, she is going to have to deal with the power pyramid in that place and will have to start trickling up from the bottom again.

 

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Are you talking to me? June 8, 2013

  

 

More than a whole year later, and it only begins to dawn on me just why she said what she said back when we first got together, and also perhaps explains what she is trying to do in continue to post her poetry.

I recalled how shocked I was with just how up front she was in regard to her sexuality, especially when she talked about her use of a hair brush in one cast, and her need to get her share of dick, or how powerful she felt when she used a strap-on. The most disturbing of these was the night – after parting from me – she went to a local pub where she picked up a young rapper, who admitted he had been (wrongfully) charged with rape. She assured the affair meant nothing to her, just working things out sex.

I think now she must have been shocked about my feeling shocked back then.

It occurs to me today how much she needed someone she could trust to stay things to, someone trustworthy, unjudgmental, a role I clearly failed to live up to n expectations.

This may well be the case in regard to her poetry – even some of the more hatful verses, such as the forgiveness poem last summer.

With the exception of a few samples of her poetry posted prior to 3010, I know little of the tone or purpose of what she wrote before. But those poems posted prior or our association in early 2012 (on her current blog), her poetry showed an intense isolation (poems I’ll look at more closely shortly.

Starting with a poem she wrote about my eye patch, she seemed to be entrusting what may be the deepest secrets of her life, a vision of her vision of the world from the inside out.

She seems to need to tell these things to someone, even when it remains unclear as to whom precisely she is speaking.

Sometimes, it is clear, she is speaking to me.

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The darknesses June 7, 2013

  

 

As much as she has revealed about herself through her poetry over the last year, some darkness still haunts her, and I hope this is not me.

I still resist concept that some of her more recent poems are directed at me, or that after eight months, I remain the boogie man in her closet, someone she has come to hate so thoroughly, just the mere mention of my name causes her to freak out.

The mood swings in her poetry are dramatic, from the intensely sweet love stuff she started out with in the new year, to a much darker and scarier landscape in her most recent poems.

Of course, I don’t expect her to shift from the intense hatred she expresses prior to her resignation from our office last October to a shrug of shoulders in less than a year, but I suspect there has to be some moderation – although several poems hint of a “let bygones be bygones” philosophy, which I no more trust than if she posted a poem full of roses and chocolates.

Several of her last poems I might attribute to mood swings, only she’s too talented and a deliberate poet to change so dramatically in such a short space of time.

And yet, these apparent mood swings come so regularly, it is difficult to understand what motivates them, since such things generally occur as a result of what happen to her in her everyday life, and since I play no part in that, it’s a mystery as to why she would consider me a threat or darkness.

If not me, then what makes up the darknesses in her most recent poem?

Over the last three months, a pattern of sorts appears in her poetry, abrupt changes from desperation to hope, then to hopelessness, and then to resolve to accept her fate in the most recent poems.

These two terrible (yet remarkably well-crafted poems) seem to paint her as a sociopath – dragging me back to the poem about fair and unfair and trickling up.

And yet as innocent as I ache to paint her (the little girl seeking love in all the wrong faces), she still comes across as a street-savvy person, who is constantly confronted by the reality of her situation. There is a pause, then a slight backtracking as she claims she is on her knees again, but unlike the past, she accepts this circumstance in this so-called brighter and move loving space, a kind of wishful thinking, I think, somehow seeking to soften the harsh reality of her existence, and these poems seem like the aftermath of her love affair, reflecting her intense disappointment, and perhaps a more significant hope that she might put an end to the depressing cycle that seems to have dominated her life (by end I mean positive rather than the rooftop thing – or the scarier concept of her phoenix poem in which she would take her opponent (me perhaps) down with her, if she goes.

But I have no doubt she expects to rise from the ashes again, even if she hasn’t yet figured out how.

She appears to be painting a happy face on an otherwise bleak picture.

But for whom?

Is she trying to convince herself that things aren’t quite as bad as they seem?

But then, in her most recent poem, she seems to take that back.

More on that idea tomorrow.

 

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Back again June 6, 2013

  

 

If there was a positive note in her last poem about surrendering, her latest poem appears to dismiss that notion, taking a longer look at the plight humans like herself face.

The more I reread her poetry, the more I am convinced her literary efforts are a kind of self-therapy, allowing her to reflect on her current situation, while at the same time, providing some kind channel for others to glimpse some of what goes on inside her head.

Unlike the previous poem where she saw hope in surrender, here she talks about how the conflict inside her should have calmed with the coming of “cooling of the night” only there is darkness “we” have not reckoned with, things that drag out of the closet that bring back the knowledge that she (or we) are mere mortals, and remind her of the “plight” (again she uses the word “we” must contend with,

“We soon forget allegiance when the huge face of fear, it rears itself.”

But if she stays quiet, this fear flees.

There are several hints contained in this poem as to the concept of betrayal.

There is a threat she did not expect that had brought back all the terror she previously felt. Who or what this is, she does not say, and could relate to me or some other aspects of her life I am not aware of, but just as terrifying to her.

She clearly can rely on those she saw as allies when it comes to this darkness and fear, and the best option she has is to lay quiet and hope it passes over her.

The use of the plural “we” is unusual for her poems, and suggests she may not be alone in this.

In her previous poem, she reflected on just how desperate her situation it, something different from what she has faced in the past, and how if she willingly accepts her fate, she might find hope and forgiveness.

The situation seems not as bad as other times when life has forced her onto her knees, and somehow, she finds beauty and relief from the burdens of will and want.

 But this poem suggests another powerful negative force she had not expected to emerge, something she can’t rely on her friends to help her fend off.

What new or resurrected threat is she implying?

Just when she believed she had hope and could somehow surrender to life and find peace, this new threat reminds her of how terrible things are, and raising questions about who she really is – “We are”.

This fear or threat makes her want to break bonds she has established.

Ultimately, her defense against this fear is to remain silent and hope that – like the Angel of Death – it passes over her.

This poem suggests she is again confronted by non-identity she routinely suffers when a career crashes.

She may well be reminded of how trapped she has become in her current situation, and hints at possibly leaping away from those she works with or whom she considers allies – this group to whom she has been nothing but loyal.

This brings us to the use of “We” in the poem to identify herself.

“Who are we?” Where does she fit in? To whom should she now become loyal?

She suggests a common threat, something perhaps that she fears to expose her allies to, or at least, cannot count on her current allies to help her fend off.

Who or what are these “darknesses that we have not reckoned with?

Some of her recent poems seem to refer to me, and yet I have done nothing to qualify as a reborn darkness in her life.

So there must be some other threat that is bringing her down.

What this is, the poem does not allude to it.

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Nuggets June 7, 2013

  

 

I keep going back to the poetry she has posted since the beginning of the year, trying to find a common denominator, and deciding once and for all that only a few of the poems (those over the last month and a half) had anything at all to do with me.

My theories about those romantic poems may be completely wrong, but clearly poems like the one she wrote about a moment in the sun were clearly dedicated to someone special, someone she has been close to physically, and someone got deeply involved in before the whole affair fell apart.

In reviewing some of these poems, I still can’t come up with who it is she got involved with, although the list of possible candidates is relatively short.

This list does not include our former temporary boss or our owner, although one former employee of our company did see the owner and her together at a fancy restaurant recently.

Although it is possible this romance involved RR, the timing is all wrong. I suspect whatever she had going with him ended sometime last fall, not their alliance, but whatever romantic entanglements they shared. Perhaps it was the cause of his marriage to dissolve, although I suspect he cheated on his wife with other women as to cause their separation. Seeing him at the Secaucus Memorial Day parade, I actually felt sorry for him, even knowing what a political cad he is.

Whoever it is has to be someone with nearly daily contact, most likely someone also employed by the city – or elected.

While this affair may have started as her typical trickling up, she seemed to have gotten swept up, her underlining romantic spirit getting the best of her practical side, ultimately leading again to heart break, making me feel sorry for her as well.

There are some possible clues as to whom this person might be, a man who is either married or engaged (more on this second shortly) which she lusted after, struggled to keep herself from pursuing, and ultimately giving into her passion, even though she knew this act would cause him problems, and would likely destroy his marriage or his relationship with someone else.

For a time, I thought this was a married man, and someone who offered to leave his wife for her, only she panicked at the loss of personal identity, and the opportunity vanished – this could have been anyone from the public safety director to the town manager.

At one point in one poem, she mentioned the engagement ring. I thought at first reading, it was his offering to marry her. But it could also have been an engagement to another woman that got in the way of their affair.

This might suggest she might be involved with the Virgin Mayor since he is currently engaged and is someone who she claims hit on her several times, including once during an interview at a local restaurant.

As prejudiced as I am likely to be in this regard, I can’t see her falling in love with him. She might trickle up with him, but love?

It takes a special man to win her heart, and I personally do not see the Virgin Mayor as that kind of person – although sometimes, she seems a bit naïve when it comes to matters of the heart.

Her poems are remarkable deceptive in that she tells truths but in such a way as to leave much up to interpretation. Anybody reading them can impose their own meaning – inspired by suggestive words and complicated metaphors, and while she can legitimately claim she is telling “the truth,” the poems many also be seeded with a few phrases designed to increase speculation, such as the time poem last fall in which she seemed to take a shot at me, and other poems where one or two lines might easily be seen in a similar vein.

This may be deliberate, inserting key words into each poem that target specific individuals. While each poem may be conveying a specific idea, these short references dedicated to specific people grab those people’s attention, while others without knowledge to what those phrases mean gloss over the rest.

She seems aware that men (and sometime women) don’t get over her easily. The wise ones – such as our former temporary boss – seem willing to accept a lesser role as friend rather than lover and continue to have some interaction with her, more remote, yes, but still in her circle of friends. The unwise appear to grow bitter at their loss of status in her life and either move on without her or become part of her legion of stalkers.

Regardless of which group an ex-lover falls into, these people never cease to love her, some clinging to the shredded remains of their one-time romance in order to have any contact at all, while others bittering resent their loss, and it seems to be these people in both categories she sends a few seeds of attention when she plants phrases in her poetry.

Like powerful mistress, she still craves the attention, even when it is negative, and does her best to keep these poor fools (among whom I count myself) strung along. A powerful mistress needs the adoration of the masses.

This is risky business. Some of these people are sharks rather than guppies. But there is a certain protection afforded her by disguising these references in poems, references so ambiguous they are easily later denied if necessary. The two owners of my company seemed not to completely believe that she and I were communicating last year through poetry – even though at times, she abandoned caution to the wind and said things more openly than was wise.

Some people she still sees in person, such as the owner of our office, perhaps feeling she still might have a need of him in the future, pumping up his ego so that he feels important around her when he feels so unimportant at home.

Our former temporary boss is different. He seems sincerely in love with her and is willing to take a step back in order to maintain any relationship with her she is willing to give him, even if it is only friendship.

Although I have seen references to him early on as the kind soul who knew how to treat her, it is impossible to ferret out other references since such references are often utterly personal, and brilliantly laid out for only that individual to recognize.

All this said, it’s no wonder I am cautious when it comes to interpreting her most recently posted poem, which I will look at more closely over the next couple of days, searching for hidden meanings that might refer to me, just as others she has left behind search through the poems for hidden nuggets of their own.

 

 

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The road less traveled. June 5, 2013

 

 

The phone calls over the last six months from former boyfriends of my former girlfriend, Peggy, prompted me to put together all the old journal entries, fictional accounts, songs and poetry into a more comprehensive volume reflecting what I did and thought back then, and to get a better understanding of the woman herself.

Oddly enough, this examination has given me a new perspective on my current situation and a better understanding of some things the poet has been saying in her poems as of late.

Although the poet is far better educated than Peggy, and managed to exist in a better environment, both women suffered from the same basic issue – how to survive in a ruthless world and still retain some semblance of personal value.

Despite the poet’s claims otherwise, she and Peggy were both extremely moral people, not so much in the eyes of society, but in their own set of values which neither violated even when at times it risked their survival. 

Both lived by their own sense of morality, refusing to accept how other people judged them. Both suffered greatly because of it, aways questioning themselves, always conscious of the social judgments they might face when exposed.

Although the poet lived in a better environment, both women were shaped by the world around them, and had to make adjustments in order to continue their lives, many times finding their lives far different from they way their originally planned.

This idea that people are shaped by the world they live in, and have to make compromises strikes at the core of the poet’s fair unfair poem, and seen in this light, suggests that good/bad, right/wrong, fair/unfair have no meaning in a world where ultimately someone has to survive,

And yet both women still refused to compromise something only they could define, their own code of ethics by which they lived.

As I pointed out in an early journal entry, the poet has many more options than Peggy did – although they both struggled with some of the same issues.

Peggy, an alcoholic and cocaine addict, struggled to keep her weight down. Our poet’s eating disorder apparently is at the core of some of her issues with self-interest, even though she seems thin to other people. Her struggle goes on even as I write this, as serious a conflict as Peggy’s struggle with cocaine.

In some ways, it becomes clear that everybody’s personal problems are as heavy as everybody else’s, because each of these two women faced these things largely alone.

Peggy was never able to find the love she needed or when she did, someone or something took it away.

This seems to be something our poet suffers from as well, although again, as pointed out, she has many more advantages than Peggy, someone of incredible talent and resourcefulness who can rise above her problems, even if at times, she appears on the verge of taking the same way out as Peggy.

She is wasted in her current situation, which may indeed be a stepping stone. But we all get trapped in things until we find a way out, and I still have hope for the poet that she will eventually – if not easily – find the road she is seeking, when poor Peggy could not. 

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Hudson City pages 3 and 4

 more handwritten pages from the novel.

Rocco was not my friend but he had been my landlord during my down and out days after the police department fired me and my wife decided she needed a divorce.

Hhe was a Gruff man with a thick black beard and a voice that sounded like a foghorn

Just over 50, he  had inherited the motel on the south side of the county from his parents who believed old Jersey with its Roadside farms dance and flocks of tourists  would make a comeback and nearly went broke struggling to keep the motel occupied.

 Rocco saved the motel by  using his mob connections to squeeze out a profit, also  serving as the county’s official temporary welfare residence,  and renting by the hour  to local prostitutes.

The place had its own history. While George Washington hadn’t slept there, Frank Sinatra and early members of his Rat Pack had while performing at the popular Top Hat night club just up the road from the motel.

Filmmakers use the place as a set for mostly mob movies since nothing had altered fundamentally about the place since its construction just prior to the fall of the stock market in 1929 and Rocco liked it that way, claiming the place had character. a truth I never disputed but always a noted with a cavate that it was a place that attracted characters like flies, one of whom was me.

Situated in the middle of a loop of a highway off ramp, the place was like a fortress with a gate like entrance through which cars had to drive to reach the interior. The office sat on the side of this gateway with a parking lot inside with four walls of the motel surrounding it.

I pulled my car up next to the window and squinted in to make out the shape of the

clerk inside this turned out to be Rocco, who at five foot five looked like one of the kids he hired – at least through the glass.

He waved me in and I pulled into the first available parking spot. There were many of these despite the “No Vacancy” sign. Welfare clients and prostitutes generally came by cab.

Rocco came out of the office door even before I had time to get out of my car, waving me towards one of the doors of the motel’s northern wing.

“Bad business,” he mumbled when I reached him and the door to the motel room. “I hate when people die on me. It scares other people off.”

“I’m sure,” I said, aware that it happened pretty often since some of the people who rented by the hour came not for prostitution but for a place to shoot up. “do you know what happened to him or why he came here?

“Why the fuck do you think he came here,” Rocco growled, fishing out of ring of keys from his pocket. “He came here to get fucked.”

“Nathaniel?”

“Men do it’ women do it; even the birds in the trees do it,” Rocco said. “After all, he’s only human.”

Rocco swung open the door to the room, the morning light revealing only a portion of the room beyond, but it was enough for me to see Nat’s bulk lying prone on the bed.

Shorter than Rocco by a few inches, Nat was a man born to be fat, a beach ball of a figure from early youth. He became the butt of every bully’s jokes all the way through college, getting his revenge finally when hired on as a local columnist

“So, what killed him?” I asked. “I don’t see any wound.”

“It’s not like that, the nervous Rocco said. “Why do you always have to paint things like that.”

“Because many people who die here usually get shot or knifed or have a needle stuck in their arms when they die.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not like that. This is natural. He had a bad ticker. You know he did. It just stopped that’s all.”

“Then why didn’t you call the police.”

“You know why. Someone like him dies in a place like this it makes headlines I don’t need headlines.”

“You say he came here for sex. So he must have checked in with someone.”

“Not one of the regulars,” Rocco said. This was someone special someone hot high class.”

“Nat couldn’t afford a high class hooker,” I said.

I was actually surprise any hooker, high class or low, would take up with Nat regardless of how influential his column was.

He stank.

Not that he had bad personal habits he did but his age just over 60 have saddled him with Many ailments typical of aging and often smelled from the assortment of medicines he used to relieve the

Suffering.”

“You saw the woman?” I asked.

“Not me but my boy did,” Rocco said. “My boy was on duty last night when they checked in.”

“Maybe I should talk to him.”

“You’re not here to do no interviews,” Rocco said. “You get the body out of here before someone else finds out it’s here>

“How am I supposed to do that?” I asked.

“You know people.”

“People I would have to bribe to move the body. And it could be a crime.”

could be a crime.”

“I’ll pay the bribe as long as you get this goddamn body out of my place.”

“Why should I help you?”

“You owe me ,”Rocco said. “When you were down and out I took care of you.”

“For a price.”

,”Sure but nobody else helped you no matter how much money you offered.”

Rocco had a point.

“I was a real prick back then,” I admitted.

“So?”

“So let me make a phone call,” I said and then you’re going to let me take a peek at your surveillance recordings.”

“Surveillance me?”

“You’re an old pervert Rocco and more than a little dishonest. You have recordings on more people than the NSA and use it to your advantage.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t keep this rat trap open on just sleaze. You can’t possibly make enough from renting rooms to afford the car you drive or the white powder you put up your nose. I known damned well you bot a glimpse of the girl that came in with Nat. Now, let me get to a phone and then we’ll both have a gander at her.”

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Hudson City pages 1 and 2

 first two Handwritten pages to Hudson City novel (i'll eventually post the whole novel elsewhere)

The telephone rang as if from another time, that old-fashioned ring I forgot I had set for my cell phone.

 it seemed to connect with some dream my drinking had inspired. So, when I open my eyes to the dark I forgot when and where I was.

The only light in the room came from that phone which I had left face up on the nightstand. This was just bright enough for me to make out the face of the old fashioned clock management had furnished the room with.

It said 3:45.

And this was not in the afternoon.

But night or day, calls did not indicate good news.

I groped for the  phone catching it just before it cycled into message mode.

“Yeah?” I mumbled into the screen still unable to get used to the idea that it had no real mouthpiece.

“It’s Rocco, a gruff voice said. “Are you sober?””

What kind of fucking crack is thst?’ I asked, just awake enough to be angry

“I need you sober and your ass down here,” Rocco said.

“Can’t it wait until morning?

“It is morning.”

“You know what the fuck I mean,” I said. “Don’t be a wise guy, I hate wise guys.”

“I got a friend of yours down here and I need you to get him out.”

“Friend? what friend?

“Your columnist friend.”

“You mean Nathaniel?” I said, forming a picture of the rotund middle age men in my mind, 60 years out of touch with the times, a  Dashell Hammond who had a vision of Hudson City that came out of post World War II. He  knew the city better than anyone I knew but always painted it in terms of old Italians Irish and Germans at a time when blacks and Latinos had taken over that turf.

Nat at Rocco’s motel surprised me, something totally out of character for a man who still went to church twice a week and to confession with a clear conscience.

“So, what do you need me for?” I asked.

“He is in no condition to go home.”

“So, call a cab.”

“You mean an ambulance or a hearse. He’s dead,” Rocco said. “Now get your ass down here. I don’t need the headlines about this.”

 

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