Betrayed again and again July 7, 2012

 

   

If the poem she posted yesterday was defiant, today’s poem highlights just how vulnerable she believes she is., and how betrayed she feels, not just by me, but by our former temporary boss whom she previously trusted, and now, does not.

This is perhaps an unfair assessment because looking back at it, he really did not betray her, a fact she will likely come to realize eventually and continue on with him as friends, mending bridges clearly impossible to mend with me.

 As with yesterday’s poem, this poem reflects and over reaction, panic and mistrust that will likely calm over time, but will never get back to where it had been previously.

She describes it as a cold mistrust that breaks through a positive heat, affecting her stomach and causing her hands to shake.

She finds herself remote from herself, looking down at the whole mess with confusion.

She claims she does not normally panic at high-risk things – she has lived her life on the edge. It’s the ordinary stuff that gets her, such as steady breathing, answering the telephone, going out for anything other than work – still worse, sleeping.

The poem uses the metaphor of a fish bowl which distorts reality, regardless of whether you are inside the bowl or outside. Reality is warped by the glass, and appears alarmed at how changed that reality is, she catching glimpses of things she thought steady, but have changed, causing her to panic.

The inside and outside the fish bowl metaphor may well be a comparison to how she sees things and other people outside see her world – but this may be stretching her meaning.

She says, she can’t even trust her own thinking, because she has failed to expect betrayal, when it appears she has been betrayed before.

Why had it taken her by surprise? She should have expected it.

What she assumed was one thing, turned out to be something else, not just this time, but every time.

The poem goes on to ask what can be trusted. Can she even trust her own perceptions (through the warped lens of the fish bowl) and perhaps she has fooled herself by not expecting to be betrayed?

The poem’s self-doubt tends to make the tone of defiance in her previous poem ring hollow, even though both reactions can be valid.

But she is clearly not as strong as yesterday’s poem implied, and is extremely vulnerable as this poem points out, raising the fundamental question is to how she can trust someone else when she can’t even trust her own perceptions.

She should have known she would be betrayed based on her experiences in the past.

Unasked in this poem, and so unanswered is what can she do to keep it from occurring in the future?

There is a tone of fatalistic hopelessness in this poem, as if she believes she can’t stop it from happening again either.



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