Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
I’m not sure if I posted the river front photos first or she
did of her having a picnic there.
I can’t even say whether or not these coincidences are really
part of an ongoing conversation or simply accidents.
Maybe if I had more access to her Facebook page other than
the stuff she posts on the external page, I might know more about what she
might be thinking.
These are not photos that appear on her art page either.
Reading tea leaves is always risky business – as is trying
to interpret reality from art such as poetry, as I learned from my mistake
about her jars.
A photo she posted last night shows a kitchen – I don’t
think her own – holding a half empty (or if you prefer half full) jar of
preserves, an image alluding to the poem I mistook as about being about her
life, rather than her battle with cancer.
If all this is a conversation, then I’m at a complete loss
as to what is being said.
Although her poems are thick with lust and love, she has
managed to avoid the romantic diatribes typical of heart break since she
started her new blog back in August 2011 – although there are moments of ironic
detachment such as those fictional pieces she posted early on, and later – a series
of poems or fiction about cheating that appear to be something she wrote prior
to 2011 and posted in part early in 2012, and then later in full.
A lot of her poems about love deal with the more physical
aspects – such as sex – or some of the psychological aspects, yet not the
heart-throb a lesser poet might pour forth (as I sometimes did in my earlier
poetry about heart breaks I’ve had in the past).
The tone of her poetry extends across a wide gambit, from completely
ruthless (such as the poem about me stabbing the back of my hand with my fork)
to remarkably kind (such as her poems about compassion and quick sand.)
She is almost never sentimental, unless is serves a
particular purpose (an attempt to elicit a reaction from someone – god knows
who.)
All this, of course, may well serve to disguise something
far more vulnerable in her, more vulnerable than she would like to let on,
perhaps a truly romantic heart she is desperate to keep under control, but
which may sometimes escape, and sometimes even comes across as manipulation
when it is not – such as that poem about the sex that was so great she could
die.
Still, she is sometimes utterly honest such as in her hermit
crab poem or the recently taken down poem about trickling up, as if she is desperate
for someone to know the truth about her.
Her early work that she posted in August to September 2011
intrigues me because – in her alluding to Biblical verse – she questions the
nature of love itself, the delusions of love, refuting the Bible’s claim that
love is kind, not envious, not proud, not rude, not self-seeking, not easily enraged,
and keeps no records of past wrongs – all apparently describing a running feud
she’s had with some love or perhaps more than one prior to that point. Love, according
to the Bible, does not delight in evil, but rather rejoices in truth, protects,
trusts, hopes and always preserves, and never fails, when in fact, she says, it
does all those things the Bible says it doesn’t, and fails to live up to all it
promises.
“Unless, of course, it finds spectacular, too-intense, transient,
blissful nirvanic company with another of the same crazy and infected,” at
which case “you can take all of the aforementioned sufferings and square them
either up or down.”
By her reckoning back then, love can indeed be something to
die for as her more recent poem claims, depending on the length and tenacity of
the relationship.
Is love worth all the sacrifice, she asks? The suffering?
The violence? The possessed and the obsessed behavior?
These that overwhelm even the meekest of the meek, or the strongest
of the strong, or the calmest of the calm, reducing them – as she claims – to moody
obnoxious infants.
Then points out that “history, poets, authors, laymen, royalty,
philosophers, Walk Disney, Top 20 hits on music charts since the beginning of
time, and even I say yes.
“Why?” she asks. “Because, Damn, when it’s good, its fucking
spectacular.”
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