The Virgin Mayor got a reprieve – at least until September,
which means our poet did, too.
But this does not cure all of her problems, only keeping her
employed for that much longer, while she still struggles to deal with cancer
and a broken heart.
And you have to wonder if maybe she has inspired someone else
to take the place of me or her Brooklyn chef, some new dark figure lurking in
the shadows of whom she must be fearful.
I once compared her to a guppie pretending to be a shark,
yet to live like a shark, even in pretense, she must do what sharks do, keep
moving or she sinks, constantly feeding, and almost always miserable.
Having documented for more than a year, I’ve come to accept what
she said in a poem she posted in May 2012 that people are not poem, and yet,
her poetry is all I have to glimpse of what goes on inside of her and what she
may be thinking at any given point in time.
She seems most sincere in her poems, even when I suspect she
might be using her poems to manipulate someone (perhaps sometimes even me), a
signature, perhaps even an honesty she might not even be completely aware of
herself, or how much she might be revealing about herself, saying one thing,
while exposing feelings she might not otherwise express openly.
Although, like me, she can use her poetry as a weapon – as I
have been acutely aware of, especially last summer when she claimed I drove
fork into the back of my own hand, or when she dismissed me with forgiveness,
while my attempts are far less skillful than hers, like a blunt sword. At the
same time, she can be merciful, as she was with her poem on compassion, or
quick sand and such.
In one of her recent poems, she claimed nobody really knows
the real her, and to a large degree she is right. The closet I’ll ever get to
knowing the real her is what I can derive from her poems, sometimes intended,
sometimes not at all.
In going back to October 2011 when she started at the
office, I realized she transmitted these poems at a time when she had just
started her new life (a few poems prior to that, although she apparently has
many other poems posted to another website earlier to which I have no access
but would love to see just to see how different she must have been back then).
She did some larger pieces about her trip to Europe and stuff about food, as
well as some brilliant if also disturbing fiction that haunts me each time I reread
them.
She appears to have posted only two poems prior to taking
employment with us (god only knows how many more poems she wrote or posted
before that. It took me some time to find the poems she did at college. But I’m
sure she has poems going all the way back to college, perhaps before that even.
The disturbing fiction she posted dealt with past and present
and seems to indicate the end of one life and the start of another – during a
period when she was desperate to find another job, applying to the most mundane,
needing to find a position where she could once again trickle up.
She officially started with us in October, but apparently
had met with our boss before that, setting the stage for what would be a disastrous
year for both of us – at the same time exhilarating, since not since the late
1980s have I seen such a creative spell.
Early in 2012, she posted something about dating a married
man, which I thought was about me until she later posted the remaining portions
of a larger piece, she had obviously penned earlier, before our encounter.
I guess the point here is that sooner or later, she will
stop posting, stop communicating, even by accident, and will fade away, leaving
a vast emptiness inside me and perhaps also herself.
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