A gesture of dismissal July 23, 2012

 


I have to stop reacting to what she posts on her site.

I keep re reading the Forgiveness poem and get enraged over the assumptions she made and the attitude she’s adopted, the presumption that all the blame is on my side, when it is not.

Mary Ann calls it “passive aggressive,” in that she apparently gets to play victim while is actually the orchestrator.

I’m not sure I’d go that far, even though at times over the last six months some of her actions seemed calculated. Yet just as often, she seemed to be a different person at different times, almost scripted for the occasion.

I can’t tell if this is intentional or merely how she copes with the world.

She spends a lot of time self-promoting, perhaps – as my old Freudian Professor Thomas might have claimed – in desperate need of love.

The salesman at the office sees her as some kind of magnet. Men are drawn to her, and she seems to accept that as natural, the right and proper way of her world. She gets upset when someone eventually upsets the routine – which always eventually happens as men get too consumed with her and want to own her.

Not all men do, only men of a certain kind. Many appear perfectly content to love her at afar, to have had their brief moment on the stage to later fall into supporting roles – friends or angels as she might call them.

But like any good casting director, she selects those who get their chance to perform with her, and later to reject them.

Those who get too addicted to her eventually become her stalkers.

But she has said more than once, when she moves on, she never looks back, and there is a certain attractive arrogance in that, making it worse for those addicted to her.

I guess that’s what’s most disturbing about the tone in her poem, the royal arrogance, a sense of superiority, a queen ushering the undeserving from her presence.

She’s too good a word smith for this to be accidental, imperial gesture dismissing the unworthy from her company. Powerful poetry and equally powerful revenge, she knowing perfectly well how indignant I will become by it, and how profound an insult.

 

  2012 menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The accidental thief

Image
    Written late February 2013   Her third poem in so many days picked up on the theme of her budding romance with a married man, yet far less blatantly portrayed as in the previous two poems. Yet, this poem is no less powerful for the intensity of its emotions it is attempting to convey. In this poem, she paints herself as “an accidental thief,” claiming to collect the small things other people are unaware they are relinquishing to her, “glimpses of smiles” the “gestures of kindness,” the “pieces of dreams and devastation and concealed consuming passions.” All this harkens back to the previous poems to a man who unconsciously seemed to transmit his affections for her. Only in this poem, such is a statement of fact rather than mere conjecture. Things are “inadvertently expressed through eyes,” in moments when the person thinks they are unreadable. How much of this is wishful thinking on her part is hard to say. But it is clear that she is building a case as ...
Read more

Waking up to Obama Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Image
              I went to sleep and woke up this morning to the Iowa Caucuses, a relentless reminder of not how much choice we actually have in the upcoming election, but how little a field of choice we have.             On one side, we have President Obama – whose biggest contribution to America over the last four years has been to kill Bin Laden, and bring down the government of Libya , and cause even more turmoil over seas, while allowing secret government operatives even more control over the private lives of American citizens.             Instead of socialized medicine, he’s given us a new tax.             Instead of tax cuts for the middle class, he’s imposed new fees on potential home owners.          ...
Read more

The parking man can March 16, 2012

Image
  Sunlight gleams off the bright glass this cool Hudson County morning. It feels like fall, but it is not fall. It is the end of winter and the leaves have already turned and fallen and are preparing their triumphant return. Some old leaves have found their way down onto street where they are whisked up by the persistent brushes of the street sweeper. Each morning, it is the same ritual of waiting for the parking man and his ticket book to arrive and pass, the sound of the brushes brushing against this asphalt world, morning music we all come to live through, as the parking man’s van beeps out its warning for us to move or pay the price, while we switch sides as he passes, and thus wisely, learn to escape his wrath.       2012 menu email to Al Sullivan
Read more