The series of poems she posted over the last few days made me think of an advertisement for margarine that used to ask people if they could tell the difference between it and butter.
In these poems, she is expressing things that I have seen before when she sent similar poems a year ago, often with similar images, expressing the intensity of her desire and her loneliness, a bit more unmasked than these poems were, but very close in content.
One of these poems appears to be something she wrote a long time ago, but that only raises the question as to whether her repeated phases, from poems in the distant past, or last year or this month, are an honest reflection of love or manipulation.
What she said she saw in my eyes last year; she says she sees again in this man’s eyes and an overwhelming sense of breathless panic.
“How do you pursue a thing you know might destroy the life who you care so much for,” she wrote in one of her recent poems.
“Forgot the inevitable call back to his life, back to his home, back to his wife,” she wrote in one of her poems to me,” and then in another, “After you told me you couldn’t look your wife in the eyes, and I thought it was done.”
She once told me she never pursued a married man, but many married men pursued her, and yet in this recent series of poems, she is clearly the aggressor, reading things in this married man’s gestures and eyes that justify her pursuit, yet not so different from what she thought she saw a year ago.
“Then I walked up to your desk and saw your eyes, and then I felt my soul soar from logic and then felt my control go,” she wrote.
This is echoed in one of her most recent poems when she wrote, “I wish I had the power to comply with what is right and true…with just one glimpse of you my will withered.”
Or as expressed in one of the poems from a year ago, “I fell hard, nearly died. You gave me life and took it from me in a single statement and a single glance.”
In the first of her most recent batch of poems, she wondered if she could keep her lust contained, to allow her lust for him to go unrequited.
In one of her poems last year, she seemed to express similar confusion and raised a similar question as to whether or not to break the “high road pledge,” but also noted that “going home to an empty bed when you want someone in it is hard.”
In her most recent poem, she puts bits and pieces together, clues to a puzzle she described as “almost criminal,” and yet she concluded such an affair “would redeem the empty room she sits in.”
Back then as now, she contemplates her involvement with a married man, and yet concludes he really wants what she wants.
Is she selling herself on something or assuming things in both cases that may not be true?
Or, knowing that in both cases, the men she is referring to are reading her poems, and are willing to buy what she has to sell.
In other words, is any of this real? Is she really in love now, was she back then?
Or are these poems, then and now, a means of manipulating the man in question?
I want to think that what she expresses in these last three poems is real, and she really is as head over heals as she claims, partly because if it is real now, it might also have been real a year ago.
