I’m still stuck on the poem she posted back in August 2011,
why she wrote it, and for whom, if for anybody but herself.
It is a very surrealistic poem, something that is somewhat
typical for those things she posted at that time.
Later poems, although complicated and thick with incredible metaphors,
tend to be better grounded in everyday experience – such as the six windows
poem and the amazing lady that walked up her street doing her thing.
This surrealism may well reflect the inner turmoil she underwent
coming out of a bad relationship with her “chefy” and the limbo she floated in,
trying to find some new place to land.
I did a rough overview of the poem yesterday but feel I didn’t
fully comprehend it. So, I’m delving into it again, searching for as The Who
once sang, “Can you see the real me,” or in this case, the real her.
Her universe is nothing stretching into nothing,” and a kind
of senseless noise that become a din in the otherwise silence, and this
unsubstantial reality threatens to loosen her grip of her perception of what is
real, and she clings to her belief of what is true, fighting for the strength to
keep on – she using the phrase “keeping time,” a musical reference that may
also mean marking time, a military term for marching in place without advancing,
going neither forward nor backwards, a kind of pointless monotony of motion. In
her case, she is seeking to keep pace with “time and peace,” which should be
reigning down on her in heaps in that empty yet – she calls “a gifted space.”
There is a lot of numbing noise, forcibly nothing – a racket
that ironically the louder it is outside, the quieter it is within.
This duality somewhat reflects her later poems about the
difference between what people see of her, and what she really is, these things
are clearly not the same.
She refers to the concept of “lack of discipline” only this
is not a self-evaluation so much as something she has been branded with “emblazoned
in and on my head.”
And here, the poem takes an odd twist, a sense of “be
careful what you ask for” kind of observation, her wish for time to rest (implying
that her life was so overwhelming that she ached for peace,” only now that she
seems to have achieved it, this thing she would have killed for, ended up “a
maddening and so-slow pace killing me with what I think.”
This may reflect some of her hamster wheel metaphors she used
in later poems (possibly earlier poems which I’ve never seen), where she is trapped
in a maze of thoughts, when prior to this she’d sought to “avoid this familiar endless
din,” and suggests perhaps a different more painful inner din that she is suffering
through “over and over and over again.”
This sound of silence driving her mad, a kind of “one hand
clapping” that is completely manufactured in her head, while in the outer
world, beyond her over-zealous brain, she is listening to the sound of silence,”
and it is unbearable.
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