Hoping for the best June 24, 2013

 

 

 I feel sorry for everybody involved in this trickle up game, not just the so called victims (we walk into  these things with our eyes open and are taken advantage of only because we have our own lusts we can’t control), but also our poet, who knows no other way of life, and must abide by the rules of a game she finds herself stuck in – and must do what she needs to do in order to retain any sense of self-worth.

This is what she is, and this is what she must do.

But even at her worst, her poetry suggests she is hardly the rascal the congressman’s PR person makes her out to be. She plays the hand of cards she gets dealt.

She sometimes misreads the deck, such as assuming that her chef friend in New York was competent, when he was anything else but that. She also leaped onto the bandwagon when it came to our former temporary boss, assuming he could do more for her than it turns out he could, his temporary condition making him of little more use than a stepping stone.

She misread me as well, thinking I was more powerful than I was, and better put together, when in fact I was (maybe still am) less together than others on her climb to the top.

She also found herself stuck in a job without any real place to climb, while the former temporary boss and I were relative innocents, succumbing to our petty lusts, once she got to the owner, she found he was hardly innocent, willing to use her and throw her away, as he apparently did when the Small Man convinced her to resign, even though our owner apparently kept in touch with her, still dated her, still brought her out to dinner (as one of our former employees reported when seeing them together at an upscale restaurant up county from here.)

She also misread the scene, unaware of how many other powerful players she had to compete against, some less savvy than she is, others far more brutal, lacking the ethics she secretly retains while pretending to be tough and street smart.

She can’t ever let on how vulnerable she really is and seems to need to put on a front of toughness in order to ward off predators when in fact she may not be nearly as tough, and it is the fiction of her savvy survival that keeps her from being consumed.

Yes, she trickles up, making her way up the power ladder in each institution. But in the past, her conquests have always been in small environments against people who are like me and our former temporary boss, hardly competition to a woman as smart, pretty and ruthless as she is.

This is not to say she is immune. All of this eats her up inside, and she is waiting for a time when she sheds all the shells and lives her life openly.

On top of all this, she has fallen in love with someone who has already put distance between them, and she doesn’t know how to bring him back, her situation almost as desperate as those she herself has abandoned in a life time of moving out of one shell and into another.

Where all this ends up, I have no clue.

After months of reading deeply her poetry, I’ve come to sympathize with her, a fatal flaw on my part since there will never be anything between us ever again, and I may never actually see him person to person before I die.

I just hope for the best.

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