The Small Man’s claim about the Bad man has me rethinking some
of the conclusions I have come to over the last year, making me wonder if the
Small Man is simply late to the party, and the man he means is the same man she
fell in love with in January and who she has since fallen out of love with, now
that he is scheduled to serve his time in jail.
The Small Man may well be reading tea leaves that are no
longer valid or are coming to a conclusion, although I suspect he really cares
deeply about her, which is why he felt so betrayed when she hooked up with RR
and tried to bring down the Congressman.
Not to mention her using the son of the Small Man’s closest
ally to try to bring down several people in the Small Man’s administration, as
well as the housing authority director and others I possibly do not know about,
all prompted by her loyalty to dubious characters such as RR, and possibly the
Bad man the Small Man spoke about.
A’s association with the mafia suggests that our poet may
have embraced the dark side as well, and was part of the plot to help R and his
mob associates retake political control of Hometown, and R’s loss may have
destroyed her ambitions to trickle up in a whole new and much more powerful
political world.
Whatever the truth is, her world is no longer what it once
was, coming to pieces around her ears, clearly reflected in the tone of her
most recent poems.
It becomes evident that she is on the brink of leaping off
the ship – into what, I can’t say.
Although her most recently posted poem is one of the
darkness she’s posted in more than a year, it flashes back to those moments on
her roof top, only for her to discover that her will to survive outweighs her
wish to surrender.
All this said, she is an extremely competent person, someone
with a skill set that will take her far even without the questionable tools of
trickling up. She is a survivor and will no doubt land on her feet and find a
new and more successful career path. But she will have to escape the path she
is on – filled with dark shapes such as the Bad man – and recover her wits
before she can regain her balance. I suspect there is still a long road to
recovery ahead of it, and one filled with more than a little pain.
No comments:
Post a Comment