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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