Her latest posting is largely a repeat of a poem she posted
when she resigned our office last year, still shouldering blame when, in fact,
she is not to blame at all.
In both cases – our office and her current situation – she got
bushwhacked by others, and yet she claimed she didn’t have what it takes.
Last year, she called herself the bringer of bad luck, the
current poem seems to look back at her whole history as if she’s always come to
the same place
“She’s really still just a loser kid in the corner,” she
wrote, and then picks up the theme from last year’s poem when she claims, “she’s
really still terrified of not being enough.”
She says she’s tried to overcome it, but it takes time for
her to float and swim again, and it takes time for her to accept these facts of
life.
At this point, she admits that he needs a little help, mostly
because she’s been alone, and needs to believe in redemption, and is looking to
get a little time.
We have a number of themes going on in this, the most
powerful of which is the idea of redemption, this need to purify herself after perhaps
having fallen away from righteousness. This alludes to some of the poems she
posted previously about wantonness and fair/unfair, not to mention the concept
of trickling up – making me believe that my initial interpretation of her
change of priority poem was correct, and her reposting it a decade later
testimony to the life she led after being diverted.
Here, she is hitting herself again in the head with a rock, passing
judgement on herself – and perhaps alluding to some conflict with someone (hopefully
she doesn’t mean me) over her behavior – wanton or not.
Her use of the word redemption is significant, although even
this has a number of meanings and attributes, she is likely aware of.
The classic Christian meaning of redemption is the action of
saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.
But another meaning includes the idea of settling a debt with
someone.
Most likely, she means some aspect of the first, an
atonement for guilt or a fault, or a mistake she needs to make up for.
Although redemption is tied offend to the concept of
forgiveness, the two ideas are not the same. redemption is the act of working
towards someone's forgiveness. It is an act you perform that atones for a bad
action that you took in the past, and this act then puts you in good standing
after the bad deed you committed. Repentance is when you acknowledge your sins,
and you are truly sorry for them.
Just what this means in her world is impossible to say.
It may simply mean her desperation to make up for the
mistake she made that severed her relationship with her lover, or it may symbolize
a larger issue, of a life of sin she needs to repent and seeks to get forgiven for.
(I am not casting a stone in this or passing judgement. I honest do not think
she is as horrible as she implies she is, although the Small Man’s warning
about the company she keeps might suggest she has gone far down that crooked
path, and because she has a conscience, struggles with guilt over it – when people
like A and her antics in Hometown would not think twice about it.
The other theme she touches on is one that goes back to her
childhood, and this believe she is not good enough, and while she has spent a
life time trying to overcome this feeling of inadequacy, she is a fish swimming
upstream, struggling to get back to that point where she honestly believes she
is worth something.
She is still “just the loser kid in the corner.”
This says a lot about her ambition to succeed, to prove
everybody wrong who have put her down her whole life.
The poem sort of blends the two themes in that she claims
she has tried to face her problems, yet has not managed to succeed, and that
she needs to change, while at the same time, may not be ready to accept that
change (I’m editorializing here).
But she needs a little help. She’s been doing this alone. He
clearly believes she can be saved, given a little time.
This is a remarkable poem of a down and out poet, admitting
the errors of her ways, while also explaining her motions – she’s done everything
she’s done in order to compensate, and to prove she is worth something, or as
the old adage says, the proof is in the pudding. She would love to do what
Janis Joplin did when returning to her hometown in Texas, showing everybody how
well she did despite their predictions, and yet, Janis came away from that
place even more miserable – partly because the people she was trying to impress
weren’t worth the effort, which may also be true in the case of our poet.
The poem clearly says she wants to be saved (even when she
wrote in a poem to me when we first met that I should not try to save her.)
This idea of needing help and needing to be saved is a major reversal and you
have to wonder who she is reaching out to: her former lover or someone else? Maybe
nobody.
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