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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