When I first read this poem about borrowed lives, I mistook
it for a light version of her trickle up poem, which may explain why she also
yanked this poem down briefly.
In this poem, she seems far less ruthless than in the
trickle up poem, borrowing other lives in order to keep her own identity secret
(and thus protected).
People think they know her, but they don’t. Others fall in
love with someone who is not really her.
There is tenderness and sadness, not to mention intense
sense of loneliness, in this poem, lacking in the trickle up poem.
And perhaps she is even deceiving herself, trying to paint a
pretty face on what otherwise might seem like a painful situation.
The poem – as with the accidental thief poem – suggests that
she is not hard boiled character her circumstances made her out to be, but, in
fact, she hides herself behind a naïve persona with each new venture.
I don’t know which to believe, whether she is hard at the
core, or actually naïve.
But it really doesn’t matter as the poem indicates we can’t
quite trust what we see when it comes to her, and what we see is not really who
she is.
She says she’s never felt at home because she’s always used
other lives to get by, clothed in other people’s lives she’s borrowed. This
suggests perhaps she has found others to model herself after in her various
roles as teacher, singer, incarnations that allow her to deal with each new
situation without risk to her true self, keeping this persona until it no
longer suits her.
She adopts this avatar (an important word) with each new
situation and takes advantage in the fact that other seemed to take comfort in
what they perceive her to be when she is really not what they think. And they
are never really as close to her as they come to believe.
She fully accepts the fact that they don’t love her, but the
person she pretends to be, at which point she moves on, perhaps because she really
would like that person to love who she really is, but perhaps is even a little
disappointed in the fact that they love an illusion instead.
If there is a comfort, then it is in the fact that she has
lived so many other lives, while other people are always trapped inside one.
She seems unable to comprehend the inherent cruelty in this,
how she offers others something to love, then snatches it away.
In some ways, this poem seems crueler to me than the trickle
up poem, in that she admits how false she is, while on the other hand, she
seems to feel the need to keep who she really is protected. Ultimately, she is
the real loser in this game, in that no matter how many lives she lives, or
pretends to, she eventually ends up isolated and alone.
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