No Sweat July 2, 2013

  

 (this is the original analysis of her poem on jars -- somewhat mistaken because it missed an important element which was her cancer )

 

Is her current poem a response to a poem I posted?

Unquestionably this complex poem continues the manipulation she started in a previous poem, but even though she seems to use the same metaphor I used in a poem I just posted, I still do not believe I am the subject of that manipulation.

My poem made reference to a jar I keep on my desk at work, and I used the jar as a symbol of expectation and possibility.

“I have to live with this empty jar on my desk, wishing I could fill it with anything other than pain, that ugly brew of putrid envy and my projected issues. The more you stir, the worse it gets, digging up detritus of my own confusion and outrageous falsehoods. You can’t stir dirty water and expect it to get clean. So, better this empty jar with my reflected face, filled with silence, and more what might have been, than a wounded innocent’s heart.”

My poem – snuck passed my always vigilant cyber nanny – was in response to some things she claimed in previous poems, an admission of guilt, I suppose, coming from having re read many of her older poems which were directed at me.

Her poem about jars is infinitely more complex, and my first reaction to reading it is that it is a trap of some sort, since she has been careful not to be too obvious when responding in print to something I have posted.

Both her poem and mine are about failed sexuality and love.

She lives her life filling and empty jars in a routine of sex or love, a pattern that in the end she is forced to scrub clean and start over, though when she comes to scrub that one person, she waits for a call or not or knock.

Who he is is anybody’s guess, though I suspect it is the same man from back in January when she debated whether or not to seduce him, and with whom she has had an up and down relationship ever since.

This need to scrub him clear as well as her jars suggests mixed feelings, as if she wants to be free of feelings for him, while at the same time needing his attention, which he appears reluctant to give her.

She is trying to stay cool (calm and collected), in her still-impoverished state, and struggles to push back down into those jars, the panic she feels over whether or not he will come to her again.

Numbers in her poetry are extremely important, and this is particularly true in this poems where she has “16 ounces;” “21 scrubbings;” “two-cent store fan;” “1,000 un-weak surges: and “two-fold panic.”

Their significance I can only speculate about, although I’m certain they had up to some important meaning in the poem.

If each jar is love or an affair, then she might mean the number of people in her life she has held out hope for – although that seems a bit too simplistic.

The 16-ounce jars confuse me, too, though I’m certain is important, maybe an allusion to Shakespeare or one of her favorite authors she studied in college. Perhaps it signifies Shakespeare’s “pound of flesh,” or her heart, using the jars as a metaphor for her heart, which she fills up each morning with hope of restoring love, only for the hope to drain from her heart by night – he has not called or written or come to see her.

And afterwards, she scrubs her heart clean – 21 scrubs per jar – and looks to scrub him, too.

Getting sweaty in bed is an obvious allusion to sex, lust to be with him again, forced to lay in front of a cheap fan to keep her cool, breathing deeply, counting to 1,000 in order to calm her hormones, struggling against “un-weak surges” which likely means her physical needs to make love with him, her two fold panic likely meaning her agitated heart, knowing the jars will be as empty as her bed when night falls.

In both poems, the empty jars seem to symbolize isolation, although mine is about guilt, hers is about not being able to be with the person who can fill her up.

If 16-ounce does refer to hearts. If so, she might be reflecting what she said in her living in other people’s shells and may have a positive aspect in that she fills up other people’s hearts each morning, empties them at night (perhaps romantically) and cleans them carefully before starting the routine again.

This idea of trying to avoid getting sweaty again, perhaps alludes to the idea that she is fighting her own inclination to seek out sex when she needs it, and is struggling to remain loyal to him, and does what she needs to cool herself, panicked over the fact that he isn’t responding.

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Putting the Genie back its jar July 3, 2013

  

 

Highlighting the dangers of assuming her poetry somehow translate into everyday reality, my first attempt to analysis the poem she posted yesterday was a dismal failure.

I’ll take a closer look at what I wrote to see if anything can be salvaged. Meanwhile, I’m writing this one up from scratch.

In some ways, it is an unrequited love poem, similar to previous poems that bemoan her inability to be with someone she loves.

More importantly, it is a poem about her struggle with cancer (alone without the apparent support of her lover), an aspect I missed when I first tried to analysis it.

It is also a description of her self-treatment, another aspect of the poem I missed, a daily treatment that comes close to being a religious ritual, something she is doing in a desperate attempt to save her own life, perhaps having little or no confidence in traditional medicine.

The description is almost clinical and manages to avoid the distasteful aspects of the treatment she must engage in and yet seems to be reluctant to describe it in detail.

But it is clear that everything about this treatment must be precise. So, the jars she writes about each jar contains exactly 16 oz each. Although she writes about filling each jar each morning, she neglects to mention what she actually does with the flues they contain, although in one Facebook post, she put up a picture of her coffee maker with a caption saying “not for drinking.”

Like a nurse or doctor, she writes about how carefully she scrubs each,”21 scrubbings each.”

Then, she takes an even deeper dive into metaphor, picking back up the romantic theme about the disconnect between her and the man she loves.

“I try to clean you, too, because while cleaning I can’t help but wait for a call, a knock, a note.”

This implying she might be able to cure whatever it is that keeps them apart in the same manner she is fighting back against cancer.

This seems to dispel the idea that she is communicating with our former temporary boss as I postulated a few poems again when I thought she might be manipulating him by expressing how great sex had been with him with me assuming she was trying to keep him in his place by pretending she still had feelings for him. This poem suggests she might still be communicating with the lover she’s had the on again off again relationship since the beginning of the year.

The poem reverts to what appears to serve her as a double entendre in implying a sexual relationship while disguising it in aspect of everyday.

Using quotes around the word “Relaxing” in bed as if she implies some other activity that might make her sweat, and not wanting to get sweaty again, trying to keep her cool, “in the one-stream weak plastic breeze” of her two-cent store fan.

This passage also suggest she is still struggling financially – too poor to afford a real fan let alone an air-conditioner. But it also suggests intense loneliness at a time when she is in a panic over her medical condition, when she desperately needs her lover’s presence and comfort.

“I try to breathe the one thousand weak surges of my two-fold panic down into the jar,” aware that her lover won’t be there for her, at least, not on the day she is writing the poem.

Two-fold panic seems to imply losing him as well as the panic involving her cancer.

There is something of a Genie in a bottle reference, but in reserve, as if she might control all these negative things if only she could put the genie back into the bottle, or in this case, a jar.

This poem goes a long way towards changing some of my assumptions about previous poems, especially the poem about how great his sex was.

While I still think it is manipulative, the object is not to placate a former lover such as our former temporary boss, the way I suggested when I wrote about that poem, but perhaps to entice a current lover to come back to her. It is a call for help, trying to let the man – whomever he is – know how intense her feelings remain towards him.

This in intertwined with her fear of dying, and her reluctance to confront her mortality alone. She clearly desperately needs him to be with her in order to provide her with comfort.

Neither this poem nor the previous poem goes into why he is away from her, thought and educated guess on my part would be to assume he is already married (and may well be the same married man she wrote about earlier in the year.)

If all this is true, then her situation must be more tragic than I imagined.

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Cancer for two July 2, 2013

  

 

I touched upon this yesterday, and will likely explore it more in depth in the future because of all the odd things that have transpired in telling this tale over the last year or so, the fact that she and our former temporary boss came up with the same kind of cancer and announced this fact to the world over the same weekend is the oddest of all, increasing suspicion about how they have been connected, even though our temporary boss is doing everything possible to hush it up.

This is a type of cancer that is contagious and is often transmitted through oral, something our former temporary boss fully admitted to, only claiming he contracted it at some point prior to his marriage. Since the cancer can lie dormant for decades in some cases, this gave him the needed to keep his marriage from imploding.

It appears his diagnosis came about last month as he informed us and the world that he would need surgery to remove the growth from his throat.

She made her announcement the following Monday.

I imagined the behind the scenes panicked conversations between those two on how to handle it, so as not to completely obliterate his personal life – although ultimately, the fact that they both announced their cancer so closely in time only confirmed that the two had been connected romantically – at least, in my opinion.

I suppose most other people saw it as a strange coincidence.

GA, the Hometown blogger, had informed me about our poet’s medical history months ago, claiming that two Hometown attorneys had accused our poet of spreading a deadly disease – leading me to believe with the current announcements that this is likely the cause of our former temporary boss’ condition as well.

Her announcement was hardly unexpected. She had been getting negative pap smears for several years.

But the duel announcements raise some questions about a poem she posted recently in which she seems to be consoling a man about not seeing him as frequently as he might like and describing the delight in his performance of oral sex on her.

When I first read the poem, I assumed it involved someone other than our former temporary boss, also assuming that romantic relationship between them had ended last summer, forcing him to settle into the role of loyal friend instead.

The poem, of course, may well have been describing something that had transpired while they were still engaged, she referring to that incident from the past to console him about their lack of it in more contemporary times.

Then or now, the poem does not deal with his over-reaction to the news about his cancer, nor his desperate need to claim he caught the disease long before hie association with our poet or even his wife, or his securing this myth by proposing to write a book about all the women he made love to in the past, and one from whom he must have contracted the disease.

This reaction only makes the circumstances of his revelation all more suspicious – in the same way his behavior was suspicious those times we met in the Hometown park to discuss her, and he refused to return back to the office together for fear she might see us and guess at what we talked about.

His behavior in reaction to the cancer is even more over the top as he built his fictional history of love making in order to keep his wife from learning he had cheated on her with the poet and had contracted a disease as a result.

All this is theory, of course, but an educated speculation.

Our former temporary boss lacks a poker face, and tends to telegraph his actions, yet always thinking himself utterly clever in his ability to pull off the lie – when in fact the opposite is true. He is constantly giving himself away, only he doesn’t know it.

This may be what she meant when she posted her poem about being an accidental thief, and how the subject of that poem was unaware of his own broadcasting of thoughts and emotions.  While that poem was not likely about him, it showed how well she was capable of reading even clever people and reading him for her would have been no challenge.

And yet, his contracting cancer must have startled her as much as it did him, which may explain her fool hearty act of announcing her cancer so soon as he announced his.

Certainly, their announcing their contracting a cancer on the same weekend is too much of a coincidence.

But I’m sure there will be more about all this in the future.

 

 

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Mortal sins July 1, 2013

 

 

I don’t know why I keep going back to poems I know are designed to tell me off, such as the one she posted a year ago last June, after some of the fireworks had started, yet prior to the real betrayal. So, the tone remains somewhat civil, yet also distant and cold.

Writing about these poems a year later gives perspective I did not have when I wrote after her original posting, partly due to all the poems I’ve written about since, giving me a better (if still inadequate) idea of who she might be behind her masks, and what she wants.

Perhaps by going back, I might hope to pick up on clues my confusion back then made me overlook, some error in direction that kept me from halting the sadness which came about later.

I think back then – and to some degree presently – I saw what I wanted to see, making judgements based on my interpretation of the life (shell or mask) behind which she hid.

Posted on June 6, 2012, her poem was the first in a series of poems directed at me, a kind of warning and a bit of wisdom she no doubt hoped would cause me to turn in a different direction, and a statement on how I had already ruined what might have been a good thing.

She seems to have sensed something about me that I could not see in myself, a desire for love or affection that I had allowed to become distorted – a hungry man’s desire twisted itself into something perverted, rather than the original purity, implying this was a deliberate act, rather than me accepting what actually existed between us.

She says I wanted to get more out of it, starving myself so as to make love (if that’s what it was) taste better. In other words, I wanted more than what she actually offered, and my intense desire twisted things.

“Instead of savoring the privileged taste that comes from a more humble and honest need,” I forced “gross want into its place.”

Thus, having fooled myself into trying to hold onto something I had merely created in my imagination, and not getting things imagined thing from her, she suggests I turned to “violent pretentions” that hurt myself and the object of my desire.

This indeed is strong stuff, I’m not sure I was able to digest when she posted it slightly over a year ago, and an assumption about me I still push back against, even though I have a better understanding of what she was trying to say, and how she must have felt being the object of such perverted affection.

At that time, I was confused and jealous, also stunned by the ease with which she could shift gears and refocused on someone other than me. At the time, I got the feeling she was manipulating me, though I did not know for what purpose.

A year later and so many other poems reveal what went on behind her all-consuming eyes and it becomes clearer she did what she did to survive, right or wrong, fair or unfair, not relevant, stirring up recollection I had from college when the mother of the girl I dated at the time informed me that I was her daughter’s “Rebound man,” and what I thought of as love was not destined to last.

In the case of our poet, love as never her objective, at least with me, or even those (I think) who succeeded me, a trickle up campaign which was where my true illusion lay.

While I mistakenly professes to love her, this was not how she felt, if not as opportunistic a motive as I assumed at the time, the most she appeared to desire was to have a good time, and kind of rewarding those of us she felt guilty over trickling up with, providing us with something pleasant for a short time until she moved on.

Nonetheless, her poem accurately depicted my reaction as “misplaced vengeance,” since how I felt was based on the mistaken assumptions about her, her desires and her need to thrive.

She, however, was mistaken in describing what transpired on her end as “gently desired” and “without fault.

Perhaps this is because she knew no better, offering gifts as recompense for her need to attain success.

This was no innocent romance, but a calculated plan, a trade off in her mind apparently, that kept her from seeing it all as mere exploitation.

She gave back something for what she took, and to some degree, what she gave was far better than what she ultimately received (this blurring some of the conflict for me since her machinations were always doomed to fail, even if I hadn’t been in the picture.

She was only partly right in calling me arrogant, and depicting my desire to destroy what I could not have.

It was less arrogance than confusion, leading to resentment when I failed to understand her need to move on – to our former temporary boss, and the owner. I took this rejection personally when for her it was merely business as usual, something it took me a year to realize, long after I indeed tried to destroy the entire thing – myself included.

The poem goes on to blatantly say that I couldn’t tell the difference between what I am and what I desire, and that my demands for “more and more and more” were destined to destroy everything, and that I seem unable to tell the difference between what is selflessly implied and a path which is criminal, and she suggests what might have been has been distorted into a perverse inclination that always seeks to destroy the necessary sense of place that could exist, but for my actions.

While the tone of this poem remains civil, the content is an enraged as her forgiveness poem she posted a bit later, and the poem about my jabbing my own hand with a fork. She is not completely wrong in her conclusions, though she goes a bit too far in coming to those conclusions because I was – to quote an old Mott the Hoople song – just one of the boys, just another rung in her trickle up ladder, just consciousness enough to realize it at the time, but not savvy enough to underway why or wise enough to simply let it all go.

Had I felt less threatened by her and what she intended, I might have become part of that club of people for whom she no longer has a use, but who cling to her as lifelong admires – such as her husband, the writer who wrote about her teaching career, our former temporary boss, all of us adoring her from a distance, still friends, if not exactly the role we all ached to play in her life.

I guess the poem is true in one important regard. I wanted and expected too much and far more than what was offered, and consciously or not, I sought to destroy it all for anybody who could achieve what I could not, little realizing that even those who got close her didn’t stay there, since she always moves on.

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On with the show? August 27, 2023

  

  

I took a stroll around a section of Passaic I hadn’t walked in since I lived on Paulson Avenue in the mid-1970s when my best friend and I used my apartment to write and record songs we hoped would make us famous and never did.

His death three years ago has left a hole in my life I can’t fill, even though I continue to record.

The walk stirred up those old memories, and then oddly, I stumbled onto a sign advertising the summer in the park concert series, only to discover that the band my poet played with for five years is scheduled to appear next Thursday, an odd bit of synchronicity since I have been typing in old journal entries from a decade ago, only to realize that there are still unresolved questions about that time in her life when she worked for the band– as to what she said to me, and what is implied in one particular poem she posted about that period in her life  -- this regarding the small old woman who gobbled up boys and girls, and who went on to encourage her to take on a role she claims she had no predilection again.

She was married or about to be which means she worked her way thorough appointment books which she used for more than just laundry lists

And yet her claim that she never cheated on those she was romantically involved with is either a lie or she did what she did with the blessing of her husband.

She claimed the band members with whom she and her husband worked hit on her or were completely misanthropic around her and that she had to teach them how to behave.

Being as pretty as she is, and clearly the center of most men’s attention when on the stage, she may well have been more than a little tempted to engage with men (and maybe women) who came to see the shows, and saw her as kind of star. She could have made a good hunk of change wearing out appointment books, doing what I thought of when I first read the poem more than a decade ago.

Of course, all these years later, the point becomes moot, since she probably has gone on to some serious career, leaving behind all the clutter, and letting the memory fade away.

August 27, 2023

 

I took a stroll around a section of Passaic I hadn’t walked in since I lived on Paulson Avenue in the mid-1970s when my best friend and I used my apartment to write and record songs we hoped would make us famous and never did.

His death three years ago has left a hole in my life I can’t fill, even though I continue to record.

The walk stirred up those old memories, and then oddly, I stumbled onto a sign advertising the summer in the park concert series, only to discover that the band my poet played with for five years is scheduled to appear next Thursday, an odd bit of synchronicity since I have been typing in old journal entries from a decade ago, only to realize that there are still unresolved questions about that time in her life when she worked for the band– as to what she said to me, and what is implied in one particular poem she posted about that period in her life  -- this regarding the small old woman who gobbled up boys and girls, and who went on to encourage her to take on a role she claims she had no predilection again.

She was married or about to be which means she worked her way thorough appointment books which she used for more than just laundry lists

And yet her claim that she never cheated on those she was romantically involved with is either a lie or she did what she did with the blessing of her husband.

She claimed the band members with whom she and her husband worked hit on her or were completely misanthropic around her and that she had to teach them how to behave.

Being as pretty as she is, and clearly the center of most men’s attention when on the stage, she may well have been more than a little tempted to engage with men (and maybe women) who came to see the shows, and saw her as kind of star. She could have made a good hunk of change wearing out appointment books, doing what I thought of when I first read the poem more than a decade ago.

Of course, all these years later, the point becomes moot, since she probably has gone on to some serious career, leaving behind all the clutter, and letting the memory fade away.

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A shift in strategy June 18, 2013

  

 

The silence is astounding.

So is the lack of traffic on my blog.

I’m supposed to meet with our former temporary boss shortly. While I feel sorry for him, I don’t trust him.

I think he’s still brimming with rage at me for our poet resigning from our office and may possibly believe I’m responsible for it.

But our poet seems determined to keep her job at up county town hall, even if the Virgin Mayor is forced to resign by losing his court case.

The office gossip told me the Virgin Mayor arranged Civil Service protection for our poet – something I already knew from the paperwork she filed with the state last month.

She may simply be bidding her time, clinging to the job there until R is elected in Hometown where she can get possibly a better position.

The distance isn’t much greater from where she lives to Hometown townhall than it is to the townhall she goes now.

Rumor has it she may have talked our former Temporary Boss into taking a job with the R administration as well -- after he comes back from surgery, something I failed to mention previously in these pages, but will get to shortly).

I don’t trust the office gossip about everything, and this is a point where I think she’s wrong. Our former temporary boss would not work on that side of the political aisle, even if he had the chance to work with our poet again.

I don’t actually believe our poet will get Civil Service protection since she had an odd title as personal assistant or something to the Virgin Mayor, not something easily recognized by the bureaucratic state government.

This also must concern her since other employees with civil service protection have been laid off by the Virgin Mayor and are suing to get their jobs back.

But if she gets a rare Civil Service title, she might stay on. But will a new administration and mayor trust her since she has already served the Virgin Mayor and his crew as a spy.

The Virgin Mayor’s arch rival, from whom she stole the secrets of his campaign, has spread the word about her.

But she is resourceful enough to possibly sway a new mayor as well, trickling up once again. Who knows.

But as I said, I suspect if she survives, it will only be until R gets sworn in, and then she’ll make the change.

It may be a long stressful wait since there is an election to get through first and R has to win it for her to get her piece of the pie.

Also surprising is the fact that even if she changes towns, she’ll still be a government worker, not something I expected her to pursue as a permanent career.

Why doesn’t she simply walk away from all this?

Or is she tied to someone else.

The office gossip said our poet has ties to the law firm run by her current boss (who is also R’s campaign press person.)

The fact that she still talks to our temporary boss and our office gossip likely shows she is also still in communication with our male owner, which makes me wonder if she still has plans for him or is simply stringing him along like an insurance policy.

Perhaps she even has hooks into D, who currently works Hometown beat, and her influence over him could be the reason why R campaign wants her – she can sway the press, and more importantly, D seems smitten with her.

This power over the press makes her hugely important for the upcoming campaign.

With one small obstacle: me.

My column would not be so easily controlled as D’s stories might be.

This is something to be concerned about – will she use her influence to get me fired?

 

 

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Spy guy June 17, 2013

 

The NSA scandal has nothing on what is going on in our office these days – especially if you believe half of what GA’s blog posts, she claims is going on with us.

Even our owner has gotten in on internet spying, as he installs more tracking devices to keep track of who is hitting our website, and whether or not – as pointed out from last year – some of the staff might be spiking their own numbers to make themselves look good in his eyes.

Someone talked him into upgrading the company warehouse, telling him he ought to post more pictures and videos. And so, as cheap a son of a bitch as he is, he’s invested in a new webpage design, and started asking us to do more picture stories.

This may or may not have anything to do with the issue earlier this year when she talked some union guys on a project in my town to allow her to do a photo shoot, one that the boss wanted me to duplicate, but I could not, unable to seduce the local workers into letting me onto the site the way she apparently had.

Our boss guesses a lot about what might be transpiring between our owner and our poet, perhaps noticing just how strangely the owner has been acting since our poet got hired, and still seems smitten with her, even after she resigned nine months ago.

I can’t tell if the owner has been spying on my computers at work the way he had last summer. He would learn nothing from such an effort since I ceased using the office machines, bringing in an old portable computer to both offices instead. Even back when he searched my computers, he could not have found anything without resorting to an NSA-like search since I removed anything from those computers that had anything to do with her, transferring files to a portable hard drive. Even then, I never did download any of the controversial things such as the risky texts and even riskier naked pictures she sent me early on.

Perhaps, he was looking for communications I might have had with GA, the Hometown blogger, making the mistaken assumption that I was source for the inside information GA posted (an assumption our former temporary boss also made) when I believe it is our boss who is feeding GA for her own purposes.

What our owner did do was install new software that allows him to better track what websites the office computers access, something GA warned me about when directing me to software that disguised IP addresses. GA is better at this game than our owner is, and apparently can track a lot of what we do as well, and certainly knows who comes onto her site – our boss, our temporary boss, and both our owners.

I have to assume that some of the reason for our male owner’s attempts to see what I do on these computers and who I talk to has to do with our poet, selling him the idea that I might actually be stalking her, something he dared not confront me with when I confessed the whole mess to both bosses a year ago. The last thing he needs is for our female boss to find out he’s involved with the poet, the way our boss claims he is.

Even though I do not think the owner will go too far in installing sophisticated software to track people such as a keystroke indicator, I need to be careful, and do everything to keep under the radar, making sure that whatever I do or say is done on my smart phone or personal laptop.

I have kept all of the communications I had with our poet – text or email – some of which verify my side of the story I told the owners when I told them she had accused me of stalking her. But I learned a variable lesson from the texts she doctored to make it look as if I was stalking her – leaving out her side of the texting conversation the way she did with her Brooklyn stalker. A comparison between what I have and what she gave the public safety director in her threat against me last year would prove an interesting literary study, comparing my copy against hers.

But I won’t go there unless I’m seriously threatened, and despite a few digs at me in some of her poems, the worst of the conflict appears to have passed, unless our owner gets it in his head, he wants to fire me.

It is difficult to tell what level of tracking technology our poet uses to see just who shows up on her blog. So, I need to be careful to disguise my IP address when I do so, and never access her blog from work or any computer she might recognize. She knows I’m looking. I just don’t want her to be able to prove it and use that as further evidence of stalking.

Maybe I am as elusive as her poem last September suggested. But in this game, I have to be.

Since I long ago lost access to her Facebook page, I have no need to worry about it, though I’m wondering if I’ve missed some of her posted poems since in the past, she posted poems there that never appeared in her blog.

What scares me more than anything is how much she might have told our owner about me since his attitude towards me has changed, as he seems determined to trip me up, and build a case to eventually fire me – something our female owner opposes but might well be convinced to do if the male owner gets sufficient evidence to use against me.

Again, I wonder is he acting on the belief that if he gets rid of me our poet friend might be convinced to return to our office, something that would definitely cheer up our former temporary boss, as unlikely as for this to ever happen.

She has made it clear more than once, she never goes back. If she leaves a situation, she leaves it forever. If she leaves a romance, that romance is finished forever.

None the less it is something to ponder over, and something I need to be wary about. She might never retrace her steps, but that might not stop the owner from axing me on the belief she might.

 

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Déjà vu all over again? June 15, 2013

  

 

I can’t get passed the idea that she yanked down the poem again.

It means something, although I’m not sure quite what.

As with Circa 2003 poem, she may have said something too openly, and felt uncomfortably exposed, a raw nerve standing out for anybody to see.

I couldn’t help mentioning my issues with her to a former writer for our paper, who had been fired nine months before she came to our office, and so had no knowledge of her, but a fresh set of ears that – unlike our former temporary boss – had no personal agenda to worry about.

This reporter showed up out of the blue to “talk” to me, and I pretty much laid out the whole picture for him – including mentioning that poem.

As with several other former writers for our office, the R campaign had approached him.

He said he declined the job and did not go into the details.

Maybe the two incidents are unrelated, and since this reporter has no love for our owners, he would not likely be carrying tales back to them or others who might be connected to this mess.

But would he tell candidate R, and would candidate R relay the information to his campaign manager, who is our poet’s boss?

Most likely, she yanked the poem because it made her feel uncomfortable having it linger in the ether like a criminal confession?

Was this the second time? I’m not doubting myself, knowing that I saw the poem before on her site in the past – only I can’t find it there either, or where she apparently recently reposted it.

Perhaps I mistook seeing it back then, but not this time. This time I took a screenshot of it.

It was there; now it isn’t.

Just like with the one-eyed jack poem from when we first met.

Perhaps, she saw the poem as being too open, unlike many of her other poems in which she says things in such a way as they can’t be used as evidence against her.

This poem was pretty blatant, so that even the least poetic among her audience might well understand what she means when she says, “trickle up.”

I read the poem to our former writer, and he might serve as witness for me if I had to call in a favor. But who would believe him, and I’m not sure I can trust his memory, if I somehow wound up in the position, I was last summer with my job on the line, or the now-former public safety director coming after me after she sold him on the idea of me being her latest stalker.

Unfortunately, this former writer for our office might not be a credible witness since while he was employed with us, he was accused of stalking as well – which he actually did.

Perhaps, the poem was a test in first place, posted as if to get a reaction from me, and to see if I might use it as leverage with the owners to prove my case (which is still pending to some degree – though we’ve stepped away from the tipping point of last July when our former temporary boss encouraged me to confess my sins with the hope I might get fired.)

At one point, I suspected she told me those salacious stories to shock me and test my reaction, something (after having read most of her poetry) I no longer believe.

Was Trickle up an attempt to draw me out of hiding, to get me to say something stupid or something she could use to support her claim of stalking against me?

A year ago, I would have suspected the worst. Now, I’m not so sure, though she has gone through a number of mood swings in these pieces, and some of them seem like angry poems aimed at me, even this late, after no contact for almost ten months.

Her poems over the last few months jumped from nasty to nice and back again.

She clearly knows I read her poetry. But I seriously doubt she would be trying to make me jealous by posting love poems to other men.

There are times when I think she is sincerely trying to communicate, using the poems as a kind of code I can unravel when many others around her can’t.

This, however, may be wishful thinking, and she posts her poems for anybody to read, leaving it up to us to get their meaning if we can.

She’s been very clever to this point about keeping below the radar, although I think her trickle up poem said things, I did not expect her to say, admitting what she does if not why, and I suspect someone may have pointed this out, or she had second thoughts and yanked the poem again hoping we all might forget what it said.

She might also be cleaning house, getting rid of something that might get used against her as she moves into some new phase of her life.

The problem is, the more she makes moves like this, the more obvious it becomes that she has something to hide, although ultimately, the pattern of her life to date has always left her right where she started.

At some point she will actually find stability and a place where she can function without needing to protect herself to such a degree.

But this is not that day, and she swims with sharks, leaving her little option but to keep from giving anybody anything they can use against her – even a tiny poem like this.

 

 

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The invisible woman June 30, 2013

  

 

One of the most persistent themes in the poetry she has posted over the last year or two deals with the concept of invisibility.

In borrowed lives, she clearly says the person people see when dealing with her is not the real her. She is another entity hidden in each of the shells she adopts as her current personal and suggest that regardless of how close a person might get to her, they are dealing with a mask behind which her real self resides.

And as an invisible woman, she often operates on a plane we who are observing do not suspect. Something she referred to in a poem posted earlier this year, w3hen she painted herself as a collector of odd things, other people rarely see, things revealed and given away, by unsuspecting people who presume nobody is watching, when she always is.

Being invisible and being able to detect signs in others is how she survives, always alter for what others reveal, be it positive or negative, she sees things in others they do not know they real: “The pieces of dreams and devastations revealed,” things concealed, yet are “consuming passions,” inadvertently expressed through their eyes.

“Innocently yet, “ignorantly believed unreadable.”

She says she collects things by accident, while she herself is disguised so few others – if any – can read from her what she reads from them.

In a poem posted last summer, she wrote about those who come to her home, eventually leave, although she really has no permanent home, and yet somehow has managed to collect a lot of people, baggage in the shell she has temporary made her home, bits of souls she never meant to collect, nor did she intend to become aware of these things in other people.

This raises a question as to whether she intentionally became a social engineer, gathering information she would use to advance her trickle up agenda.

In some ways, what she does appears to come as instinct, her desperate need to know things in order to avoid being shanghaied into some situation she does not expect or what, even perhaps avoiding the illusion of love.

This may explain her comments in the poem earlier this year when she had a chance to say “yes” to her lover but would have had to trade “I” for “we” and she stalled too long thinking about it, the opportunity vanished.

Her life and what she sees and collects resembles a jigsaw puzzle in which she has random pieces never meant to be assembled into a coherent picture.

And in this poem, as well as more recently posted poems on barrowed lives, she remains isolated and alone, scared when she must abandon her most recent shell, and one gets the impression that to exposer her real self to anyone risks her becoming a victim, and that she needs to keep herself safe even at the expense of being lonely.

These two poems and hints in other poems suggest she lives a life of stealthy, confiding in very few, collecting what she needs on the sly, not letting even those closes to her know exactly who she is or precisely what she wants, answering a question I had a short time ago as to how much she tells other people, when in truth, not much, only what she needs to divulge as a means of getting what she needs or wants.

But there is a price to be paid as if in a deal with the devil.

In the earlier poem, she can’t seem to assemble the pieces of lives she accidentally collected into the semblance of a person she might love or whom might love her, and finds herself in a room alone. In the other people, she talks about how she backs out of lives that are not her own, bits and pieces of her life breaking off, her heart and soul. She gives up on people she actually loves, but who have fallen for an image that is not really her, with the small consolation of having lived many lives, though unsaid, she still ends up alone, unseen, unrecognized as to whom she really is.

 

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She sells sea shells by the sea shore June 28, 2013

 

 

After re reading her poem about borrowed lives, I went back to a poem she posted in the heart of our conflict last June, even though there are other people the might be better in expressing similar themes.

The poem she posted on June 1, 2012, however, seems to fit in with the idea of moving on, leaving the residue of her old life behind so she can continue to invent a new life.

While I wrote about the poem after she posted it, a year’s study of her poetic works changes my previously cynical approach I had back then.

In what might fall under the heading of “It’s more trouble than it’s worth,” her poem depicts her standing near the sea at night, breeze blowing through her hair, aware of that “it” is everywhere around her, around every corner. She can see it waiting, “harnessing all tis strength by taking what she didn’t know she gave.”

The allusion suggests that this person or thing feeds off her like a leach, and if she does not get ride of it, she won’t survive -- although it is also about surrendering, giving up something that clearly does not support who she is and what she needs.

Implied, if not said, is the idea that by releasing this thing to the sea, both it and she area better off, the sea being symbolic of a number of things, not least, regeneration and rebirth, as well as endless opportunities, and for her, she only realized her need to be rid of it when she knelt aside the seat and left this thing for the waves to carry away.

Love, affection, tied to an extreme sense of regret (and hope for something better, regret and relief at the same time, having resolved something without the kind of drama she had faced in the past (a scary thought looking back a year later on how everything she had hoped to send out to sea continued to cling to her, and would ultimately force her to be less gentle – though in truth, even her most ruthless poem (even the one in which she forgave me) continued to hope for a peaceful solution.

At this point with this poem, she was not yet willing (and perhaps not even able) to shed the shell she had borrowed to continue her life, still seeking to find a use for the life she had adopted. But again, in retrospect, it is obvious shedding this shell was a foregone conclusion, largely because “it” would continue to haunt her until she did, when she would have no other choice than to seek a new shell to live in.

What strikes me hardest (and causes the most regret) is just how tender a poem this is and reflects something of her inner self I had not previously seen, a person behind the mask looking to get out of a bas situation without causing someone else pain.

This is not the ruthless opportunist she tried to project in some poems such as trickle up and may well explain the inner conflict she suffers when she tried to live up to the personal of a street-savvy person when down deep she is something else entirely.

 

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Lambs blood June 12, 2013

  

Looking at those people who follow her on Twitter, you have to wonder if maybe she intends to make a grand return back to our office, sparking the dread I had last summer when I half believed she intended to eventually become my boss.

Not merely, who follows her, but who she follows as well – the owner, our boss, even our office website.

She would be crazy to come back, since the owner isn’t going to give her the kind of money she deserves.

The fact that she is following our boss, who herself is in the midst of a nasty divorce, makes me wonder if perhaps she senses an opportunity, and might move up from her one-time role as cub to a new role in the corner office, near enough the owner and our former temporary boss to possibly make the trip back worth it after all – especially if she can attain the kind of money our boss makes.

It is also difficult to figure out if she does better manipulating men than she does women and may well explain why our boss when she came back largely ignored some of our poet’s bolder statements at our weekly meeting.

The boss and owner (not to mention our former temporary boss) follow her on twitter, even though for the most part nothing she posts is every newsworthy, nor has anything to do with her job doing PR.

How much she tells the owner or our boss about me remains a mystery, though she must have said something to our owner for him to search through my work computers.

But what did she say to our former temporary boss is a different matter, especially after I threw him under the bus a year ago, a jealous attempt to put a wedge between the two of them.

Lately, he’s grown more distant, although I’m more concerned when he acts overly friendly, leading me to suspect he and she might have concocted a trap.

The former temporary boss tried to get me fired last year after I told our poet that we had been talking about her.  I can still hear his cold voice on the telephone saying if asked by the owners, he would not hold back from telling the truth.

What truth? About her?

I don’t think he suspected I would tell the whole story to both owners about my involvement as well as what the former temporary boss said and did during that stretch of time.

Why has he become colder again after all these months of relative peace?

Has our poet talked to him about me?

Does she want to come back, and if so, such a feat would require my removal. She wouldn’t work here if I’m still here.

She appears to be following my blog pretty closely, perhaps to keep an eye out for something she (and the former temporary boss) might use against me.

Her poetry and her history, however, suggest that she rarely confides in people without a purpose, and what she says fits her agenda – such as the stuff she gave the public safety director or the stuff she keeps about her former boss in New York.

But when it comes down to trusting others, she seems to have a very small circle of people she trusts, and I suspect my boss, the former temporary boss, the owner and such are not in that inner circle.

This should be a relief. But from several calls I got at home from someone in the town where she works, I think she confides in someone about me, other than the public safety director.

I do not know if I still hold the lofty position in her life as a stalker, someone she claims to fear, someone she can use to get someone else to protect her.

All this is likely paranoia, but it does cross my mind from time to time that she might still be as enraged now as she was last summer.

Her poetry sends mixed messages, such as the poem about Compassion and another about quick sand. She seems to sometimes regret things she does, even against her alleged stalkers.

Maybe she reads GA’s hometown blog and blames me for the bits that appear there about her, when I actually suspect the true author is our boss.

But for some reason, I feel as threatened now as I did last summer and need to stay low and not talk about her to anyone, especially those inside our office, all this with the hope that like the angel of death, this too shall pass.

If only I knew where I could lay my hands on some lamb’s blood.

 

 

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The shell game June 27, 2013

  

 

Her most recent poem stunned me in a different way that the one she posted two weeks ago, partly because she has exposed herself in an unexpected way – just the way the trickle up poem did, and less disguised in its openness than her poem about change of priorities in 2003.

Not only does the current poem raise the question as to who she really is once you strip away all the masks she typically wears, but also why she decided to reveal herself now, and to whom she is really revealing herself in this poem.

The tone and subtext suggest that she is once more moving on, stepping out from one avatar and preparing to adopt a new face, although in the past she mostly did this when something dramatic occurred, the failed restaurant in New York, or the fire that gutted her apartment upstate, affairs falling to pieces and her need to pursue some new career from dancer to horse trainer.

Yet from the exterior, nothing of the sorts seems to have occurred in her life just now if you discount the sex poem and her need to prop up some man’s ego, which also suggests she is looking elsewhere for something else to do with her life.

For how long this identity theft has been going on, it is difficult to tell, maybe as far back as school where she got picked on as a dork, and decided not to let people get at her real self (whomever that might be) and decided to take on roles, masks she could put on and take off, keeping her real self locked away in a vault deep inside herself.

She refers to these as “borrowed lives”, which suggests she took them from somewhere o someone, and makes me think again of the old woman on that cruise long ago who taught her a whole new way of living, acting out a role that allows her to survive without the risk of revealing her true self.

Even thought she talked about her six windowed residence as home, her real home (if one actually exists) is the current shell she’s adopted, like a hermit crab or more like a turtle, a home she carries around with her until she no longer needs it, or for some other reason has become less inhabitable, at which point she abandons it for another shell, another persona.

It seems a times she may use the same persona in relation to a number of people, such as the cub reporter in search of a mentor which she used with me, and more successfully with our former temporary boss.

She seems to have played other parts in other places for other people, expanding on the basic concept of psychology where if you do all those things are role would require, you eventually become that role – at lease, for most people, yet apparently, not for her.

She rarely comes to believe in herself as the person or position she is acting out, and this disbelief creates what is called “role distance,” where you don’t quite take yourself seriously, though must maintain the act if only to save face, and when others begin to doubt you in that role, you need to abandon it, or drive yourself crazy.

I’m sure she will eventually adopt a role she actually believes, but clearly, from this poem, she has not yet done so, and is forced to leave on shell for another, testing each new situation to see if the shell fits her better, and can give her confidence enough to believe she can adopt it as her shell, her home, for the rest of her life.

The poem coming now suggests she has serious doubts about the role she is currently playing and is looking for a way to abandon it.

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The masks she wears June 26, 2013

  

 

Two weeks after posting an extremely manipulative poem about how great sex with some man or maybe a woman was, she steps back out of her protective cover once again, reviving the pattern of her life in a brilliant but complex poem about how people really don't see who she actually is, but rather the life she happens to be living at the moment.

Unlike her Windows poem that she posted last summer she says she has no home – a theme she has previously touched on, suggesting that everything is temporary even the projected image of who people think she is.

Life is never what it seems and though people believe they have a grasp on who she is or what she wants, she as well as life constantly changes identity, largely because she often adopts a different persona to meet her needs

“I've never felt at home because I've never been at home,” she says.

She survives by clothing herself in what she calls “borrowed lives”, lives that are not really who she is but rather a shell she crawled inside even when at the core, she stays is the same.

When she grows beyond the Avatar she lives in, she sheds it and for a brief moment finds herself free but curious and lonely.

Like a chameleon, she adapts to each new environment becoming something -- at least on the surface --

 other than herself, a persona others presume who she is, when in reality she at those moments is only wearing a mask.

Removing the mask, changing identity, is a liberating experience but also a perilous one leaving her real self exposed and vulnerable and oddly lacking an identity others would recognize.

Outside, for that brief moment, she sees the shell she previously occupied and she takes advantage of the way those around her seem to find some comfort in the vague familiarity of what she wears.

But those people are distant.

This is a very complex idea implying a lot about who she is and how she lives her life, how she borrows lives until they are no longer have a use for her, then abandons it and those people attached to that temporarily identify.

Then, when she comes to realize this life really isn't about her life, she moves on, bidding farewell even to those she loves, yet who have fallen in love with an image that isn't her, rather a projection, the shell, the life she temporarily shrouded herself with, pieces break off her heart and soul, she says.

But she seems to take satisfaction in the fact that she has lived at least two dozen lives while those she leaves behind lead only one.

This poem begs the additional question as to who she really is, and whether anyone has ever met the real person behind the two dozen masks she claims to have warned over her short life.

 

 

 

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Lovemaking so good she could die June 25, 2013

  

 

I'm revisiting this recent poem not because of its complexity but rather its intense sexuality and how it seems to say something other than what it says on the surface.

 This by far is the most provocative of all the poems she has posted in the year and a half of her current blog and as pointed out in earlier journal entry about this poem she clearly has gotten involved with someone again, an acutely sexual encounter that lacks the emotional appeal the poems she posted earlier this year.

Although she posted a poem earlier about her lust for a man the relationship rapidly evolved into something more than just a physical affair whereas in this poem lust and all its associated sensual experience is at the core.

She seems to focus on the remarkable physical closeness of her latest lover, while apparently also creating distance between them. (something like the poem I wrote about her last year in which I said, “it never gets any better than this,” when it was clear the relationship was already eroding.

This poem is unusual for her in that it expresses a kind of poetry I have not seen from her prior to this or rarely, extremely sensuous when most of her poems tend to fall into a more intellectual vein, full of word play and allusion and clever literary devices.

Earlier this year she posted something close to this emotionally when talking about a moment in the sun, this poem takes that a few steps further into a clear sexual state openly expressing it for the first time.

Who the lucky man she writes about is anybody’s guess. Most likely someone she works with on some level, to whom she has become physically attracted, someone she claims bowed her over to a point where she can’t breathe in a good way, someone she says, “reinfuse me with it, every time you come close to me, every time I hear your voice,” in reality or in her mind, through a doorway in a room, in her ear, or below her when making love, “moaning, growling slightly,” and her breath returns, joining him, pacing with his, screaming out in bursts of never allowed joy (she once claiming she screams a lot when making love.”

Whomever the man is to whom the poem is written appears to be a lucky man to have such powerful verse written on his behalf (or is he?)

Her apparent attachment to him amazes me.

She seems to see that they have a lot in common, how they breathe in the same rhythm.

“The same in and out,” she writers, “After the in and out, of the body and soul” referring to the rhythm of making love yet going beyond this to define the act as something much more significant, “of soul and heart.”

“Or at least mine,” she wrote.

(If all this sounds just a bit too good to be true, I’ll explore that later, needing first to lay out the scenario she has presented in order to make another case.)

She says she watches him as he has oral sex with her, her fingers weaving in his hair, as she shudders against him again and again, clinging to him as if for dear life – that last moment on earth, and she would not – she claims – be upset it the world ended or she died, a variation on the classic cliché about lovemaking being so good she could die.

In an early journal, I raised the question as to whether or not this poem was an attempt to manipulate him, which the language of the poem suggests she is, although does not completely say for what purpose.

The hyperbole continues when she says, “And God, the light, it pierces my brain from my belly where you are,” she writes, strongly suggesting he is making love to her with his mouth between her legs.

She looked down at him, watching his every move, aware of every hair on his head, every curve of his “beautiful face,” and his mouth, his back, his legs, his arms.

Those arms hold her so strongly, she forgets herself, she says.

She holds on tightly, also suggesting that he has commitments elsewhere when she writes: “Knowing you must go, sooner more likely than later,” though she is consumed with the “now,” and his “skin pressed to me, into me,” and his voice vibrating through her whole body.

This will be her last thought, last vision, last smell and last sound, something she will continue to hold onto even when she dies.

As pointed out a few weeks ago when I first wrote about this poem, this smacks of manipulation, over kill, exaggeration to the point of unbelievability.

As said earlier, it is difficult to determine what she hopes to gain by posting this poem, since historically every joy she experiences tends to be temporary, and while she says she is thrilled, the whole affair comes with the linger question of his commitment elsewhere, and this underlying sense that maybe she’s not too upset by his being forced to leave, and has powerful an experience as this is, it is destined to end the way nearly all such experiences have in the past with him going back to live with his wife.

Yet, while she claims she is left with the memory of his having been with her, the exaggerated rhetoric seems to suggest that something else is going on, even when she tells him the affair was so potent its worth having her eventually alone again.

The reality behind the poem suggests something perhaps a little sinister, while she claims having been with him is worth the pain, there is a sense that she has other reasons for saying all that she is saying in this poem, as if she is saying all this for a purpose that has little to do with her desire for him, and perhaps more to do with assuring him she still feels strongly about him, when in fact, the poem suggests something different entirely.

Again, we get the cliché about how good the lovemaking was she could die today, assuring him he is still prominent in her thoughts when she most likely is keeping him happy and in the loop, but has already moved on to someone else.

I’ll explore some of this more tomorrow.

 

 

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