Prison of her own making July 10, 2012

  

It doesn’t take much imagination to whom she meant as a vampire in the poem she posted today.

The real question is who she meant as her angels? I make an educated guess but will never know for certain.

The poem covers a time when she clearly feels under attack and has taken refuge in a self-created bunker with as she calls them “concrete kryptonite walks,” something like an air raid shelter from a different generation, built to protect people from “the bomb.”

Or this might well be a bank vault since later she refers to someone with the right combination, “the right Morris Code knock” to help her escape.

You could almost envision her as a Steve McQueen character from The Great Escape, bouncing a ball off the walls while waiting to get out – only this is a self-imposed imprisonment, and she is hunkered down for her own self-protection.

So, even when some people who are “kind enough, and persistent and smart” come to set her free, she resists leaving this place of safety because it goes against her instinct for self-survival  -- and it is only when they finally free her does she realized these people are angels as opposed to the “vampires with closed mouthed smiles” who pretend to be.

Her hiding in her fallout shelter is not new as the opening lines of the poem suggests, and there is a tone of self-approach when she says some people learn from experience to survive “the dark hours,” as if an allusion to her own poem previously posted about what she might have expected.

The use of the word “kryptonite” suggests the need for superhuman effort to ward off external evil, or perhaps needing it to ward off the powerful evil trying to get in at her.

During these times, she says, she is general alone, except for a few cats/

But occasionally – actually she uses the word “rarely” -- some kind souls figure out the combination to the safe she’s locked herself in and they lure her out, showing her angelic kindness as opposed to the evil vampires show.

The use of the term “picnic cooler fort” connotes additional meanings and supports the concept of self-containment and protection. “Cooler” is a term sometimes used to refer to jail, in particular a World War II prisoner of war jail. “Fort” also connotes a protected space where the inhabitants are protected from external threats rather than simply a prison. “Picnic” suggests something not permanent, a temporary retreat, setting aside just enough provisions to weather the storm which must pass on eventually.

The use of the term “Morris Code” also harkens back to both World Wars and may well allude to the most famous Morris Code, “SOS” signifying distress, and suggests that someone, maybe more than one, recognized her call for help and were “persistent and smart” enough to rescue her from this prison of her own making.

 

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