A D Journal 2012

   Two months after the last time we’ve had any contact, she apparently is still looking over her shoulder for an ogre that isn’t me. Although the poem feels as if it is aimed at me or at some other poor fool that has mistakenly flown into her web and has graduated from creepy-crawly to a full-blown stalker. As in some of her other poems, there seems to be three characters involved, one who is warning another about a third – that illusive stalker-like character who prowls around, but whom the speaker just can’t nail down, a sullen, moody, even cantankerous little boy, who get annoyed for no good reason. But it is easy to overlook the real meaning of this poem by assuming the obvious and mistaking her metaphor as the essence of the poem, when she means something completely different. On the surface, the poem seems to depict a stalker, and the speaker cautioning herself against him. In this aspect, the speaker sounds utterly reasonable, but needs to remind herself th...

   The title of her latest posted poem is a play of the old metaphor “food for thought,” and a back handed tribute to French philosopher Rene Descartes, who is perhaps best known for his maxim, “Cogito, Ergo, Sum,” (I think there for I am) – one of the most controversial claims in philosophic history. Many more modern philosophers tend to rephrase it as “I doubt, therefore I am,” meaning if you are consciousness enough to doubt, you have consciousness Still, others in the age of AI believe it is possible to have thought without existence. Many accept that our existence is the only absolute truth, and that doubt is a firm foundation for knowledge. In this poem, she moves further away from the idea she expressed only a few weeks ago when she talked about lulls in her life, possibly generated by the increase doubt about where her life is headed. She has returned to the hamster wheel in her head and the parade of “manic ideas” spinning and knocking around in her brain, bashi...

  We knew this was coming, this move from a building of our own to a cramped little store front down at the other end of town, a panic move by two incompetent owners, who figured out if they sell the wreck of the building, they can stave off shutting down the business – at least for a while. This may explain why the owner wouldn’t give her a raise – or fired other people even for asking for one, they are squeezing every penny then can from this dying business and don’t want to share what little wealth there is. The move isn’t the end of the world. I’m still in exile regardless of which place I work out of. Truth be told the old off is a disaster zone, something left over from another era, leaking pipes, poor heat, worse air conditioning, so it’s frigid in winter, scalding in summer, and dripping like crazy whenever it rains or anybody in the apartments upstairs flushes a toilet. Yet for some reason, I still like the place, even when I’ve plotted to get out of it, something ...

  Dickens said it best when he said it was the best of times and the worst of times. This being the 40th anniversary of the worst and most painful year of my life, until now. Although comparing this year to that year doesn’t quite work either, I was young and foolish then, just back from three years on the run from the police, a confused boy with almost no notion of where I was going only where I had been. I saw my wife take off with my daughter who I’d not see again (except for one night) for another decade. Forty years later, I should have been wiser, but I’m not. I never felt so lost as I did then, the chill of Thanksgiving coming upon me with the threat of winter, dead leaves still clinging to the trees. I always loved autumn, yet always felt its sting when the last of the leaves fell, before the snow, bare limbs exposed. I thought I would never feel so lost again as I did then. This year came close, and I’m grateful finally to see the year end. I ache inside th...

   The operative line in the poem she posted today is about selling yourself, “as we all do, as best we can.” A startling comment inserted deep into the body, something utterly obvious, yet surprising at the same time. This is not a new concept for her, since she has spent a life time selling herself well enough to get in the front door. But in this case, she may have overstepped a little, seeking to graduate from our pissant little world into perhaps the most prestigious publication in the world. After all of her boasting about our office being a stepping stone, her applying for a job at The New York Times should not have come as a surprise. The poem depicts her journey to The New York Times building, although the opening details the largely defunct former Times headquarters at One Times Square, taken over by numerous corporate entities after the Times abandoned it, only for it become a largely vacant shell of what it had once been, the exterior turned into a bill...

  Word is on the street that she’s been making calls around the county looking for dirt on the Virgin Mayor’s political enemies. And it may not be RR that’s pulling her strings – or at least not him alone. You have to wonder if maybe she feels a little trapped. I always got the feeling that she uses her poetry to say things she can’t otherwise openly say even to herself, perhaps assuming that those like RR and perhaps the others wouldn’t catch on. Perhaps she assumes that some people might be clever enough to read between the lines of her poetry, even someone she has come to hate such as me. How she came to be where she is at this point and who she is answerable to remains a mystery to me. I’m not sure which side she is on, paid by the same people who pay the Private Eye to keep tabs on the Virgin Mayor perhaps? Or is she as loyal to him as she claims – with the brief blip on the radar when she sided with RR against the Virgin Mayor. Or is she completely out of her le...

  The Private Eye grew up with the Neighboring Mayor, kids from the same hood, who did everything together, legal and illegal, best of friends through the rough years, including the Neighboring Mayor’s rise to power. The Private Eye was in the Neighboring Mayor’s inner circle, along with another hood buddy named Woodchuck Phil, who were privy to all the mayor’s dirty little secrets, helping him to get and keep power. The three of them made a tight little circle into which nobody else was welcome. The mayor loved the private detective, but merely felt sorry for Phil, yet kept both of them close – perhaps, too close. Not everybody felt comfortable around Phil or dealing with the mayor while Phil was around. Phil was bossy and tended to take over things when the mayor was not around, and insisting people go through him to get to the mayor. As loyal as Phil was, he alienated some of the other mayor’s key people, many of whom urged the mayor to sever ties with him. Phil te...

   I met the neighboring mayor at the diner where he expressed his continued distrust for our office, especially our boss, not the writer who had left to become personal aide to the Virgin Mayor. “She was only doing what your boss told her to do,” the neighboring mayor told me. “And your boss is getting her directions from (the Private Eye), who hates me because I couldn’t make his police chief.” The Neighboring Mayor had been under pressure to pick a black police chief. The Private Eye had been deputy chief, but didn’t have the qualifications to become chief, even if he’d been black. Paid by the Senator to find dirt on the Neighboring Mayor, the Private Eye eventually found enough dirt to bring down the Black Police Chief but could only find petty stuff on the Neighboring Mayor – but not for want of trying, using our office and the local Web Man to do so. The Neighboring Mayor might have felt different about her had he heard all the horrible stuff she had said about h...

  At some point, the truth has to come out, because any conspiracy involving more than two people means someone will talk. The problem is, how do I know who is telling the truth, if anybody? Sometimes they are all lying, although someone may feel the need to blurt out the details which gives everybody away. This is partly what happened last night in an email exchange with the private eye going after the neighboring mayor, and his reaction to posts made on a video by one of the northern county web news reporters. He didn’t like my questioning the newly created jobs by the Virgin Mayor. Some of the lesser people in the administration were angry at the jobs because they hadn’t gotten the raises they had created. The jobs in question, of course, went to her and RR, and some long-time loyalist to the Virgin Mayor feel a little put out. But the Private Eye was upset when I asked whether or not these attacks on the Virgin Mayor were being prompted by the State Senator rumore...

  The owner dissed our former temporary boss again, telling him not to bother coming in all next week, one more sign that the owner has something against him. But just what I can’t say. Hard to say it has anything to do with her. Her last poem suggests she is in a temporary bliss and comes at a time when she is entering the wider world of politics. I got it wrong a few days ago when I stated that RR became the Virgin Mayor’s aide; RR was named deputy mayor, while she was named aide. But perhaps there’s a shadow hanging over her and RR, since she got a message on her Facebook page yesterday from some old male friend who asked if she remembered him, boasting about his company to her, a bit of bravado that might well attract her. I keep rereading her poems and have come to the conclusion that she is obsessed with time, a moment to moment-to-moment existence, and the in-betweens that allow her to rest briefly before plunging into yet a new endeavor, brief lulls that allow...

   Her latest poem truly reflects the place she has arrived at finally, a taking stock moment when she has escaped the mania of the Charlie Chaplin factory and yet has not fallen into the waking slumber of dull routine. This comes just as she has been elevated to special aide to her Virgin Mayor, his person public relations person, a position she knows won’t last, a temporary limbo from which she will be trust if she even sneezes too hard. She has been in this space before, and from the tone of the poem, she seems to have forgotten just how peace it is to be in transition, neither caught up in the constant hubbub that real life seems to require or not letting life waste away with pointless routine. It is clear that where she has wound up is not somewhere she intended to be, and yet, she needs to appreciate this in-between time, knowing it can’t last, also knowing that soon she will have to make choices that plunge her back – either into the trickle up she needs to get ...

  He called to say hello, or at least that’s what the receptionist said when I called in from the road, we all still in shock nearly a month after her resignation, he still mourning the loss as if she had died rather than just moved on. I’m constantly doubting myself on all this, what really happened, and whether or not it was orchestrated or simply happened by accident. She’s not the only one in our office that admires him, my manager at the auxiliary office gushing about him when ever his name comes up, about how much he has to offer, how good he is to work with, how much his talent is wasted working in a dump like this. Some even sense how wounded he was at her leaving but stay silent as to not make matters worse. I know he still talks to her in both private and her role as PR for the Virgin Mayor. Some things he’s said reflect her current aspirations, much of in the same line as to what she used to tell the office gossips, so I don’t trust any of it, even though he ta...

   RR got his hooks into our new writer even before I had the chance to warn him. No doubt, she steered the writer into RR’s clutches. Somehow, at the same time, she became PR for the Virgin Mayor, RR became the mayor’s aide. It’s an old routine the Mob Man from Secaucus used to do whenever he got one of his “virgin mayors” elsewhere in the state, getting himself as close to the center of power, making himself indispensable, and making certain everything had to flow through him to get to the mayor. The problem is, this Virgin Mayor isn’t the real center of power in this town. He has always been a trojan horse for that pack of prairie dogs that gravitated to his town when they saw him was on the road to victory, and over the last year, slowly took the reins of power, leaving the Virgin Mayor as largely a figure head. This pack is made up of Joey D, the real PR Guy, the Insurance Man from Newark, the Local Developer and a few lesser vultures, who control the various ...

  She’s personal, not political. So, this new arrangement is really all about strange bedfellows, that group of political opportunists that have aligned themselves with the virgin mayor, getting themselves well placed for later profits. She’s never played that game before and may be a little out of her depth when it comes to those kinds of maneuvers. They may also read her wrong as well. She puts on a good act, and they may actually think she’s better connected than she really is. No doubt, they want her to help them do their political dirty work and may be surprised to find she doesn’t know how. This may not be true for the mayor who is nearly as naïve as she is, someone who fell into office because his opponent last year was so unpopular – not just with the people but with other powers, such as the congressman, the little man and the neighboring mayor. Unfortunately, his ineptitude politically has alienated at least two of those three, possibly all of them. But he h...

    So, she’s gotten a job as public relations person for her favorite mayor, dispelling the notion that she and her boyfriend, RR, had severed their connections with him. She joins a rogue’s gallery of some of the most second-rate corrupt people in New Jersey politics, a group of characters from far and wide drawn to the “virgin mayor” like bears to honey, and now stuck with him as he faces criminal charges. The fact that RR is trying to latch onto her replacement at our company suggests he hasn’t learned anything from his experience and is still desperate to use us to serve his political sabotage. Although I’d like to think I am not the subject of her last two poems, it is clear that I am part of the storm that has left her life in ruins, snapping her calm like a thousand limbs, and part of the wind that brings internal things out and scatter them for all to see. I am also in the second poem, among the “unwelcome surprises,” that had pestered her in the dark of night...

  A day after posting a poem about the devastation of a storm, she picks up on a similar theme, a resurrection out of the ruins in the guise of a phoenix. Most offend associated with Greek and Egyptian mythology as symbolizing immorality, resurrection and life after death, reborn from the ashes of its predecessor. It is often associated with sun worship, which she makes good use of in this poem. The use of it as resurrection is apt considering the pattern of her life which has seen similar regenerations and comes at a time when she is once more reinventing herself with her new job in public relations for her mayor and his collection of scallywags. A big fan of the Harry Potter series, she may well also see the phoenix as a symbol of rebellion and entitlement. The wizard Dumbledore makes use of the Phoenix to make his escape from self-deluded superiors in the Ministry. Perhaps more importantly, the mystical bird aids Harry Potter and his loyal band of junior wizards in his c...

  Leave it to her to use a super storm as a metaphor for her life, two weeks after her resignation putting it all in perspective. She managed to somehow post the poem prior to the massive loss of power that our whole part of the world suffered, while we moved out of our offices to take refuge in the maternity ward of a local hospital which still had power, and more importantly, access to the internet, where I got view this short but potent treaty on her current condition. Reading this a year later, out of context with the storm, I might have assumed that it reflected some new major personal catastrophe, and might have painted it as a negative poem, when the opposite is true. The poem, instead, reflects the turmoil she had already gone through, and uses the advance of the storm as a metaphor for what has already transpired, and ultimately, the poem reflects a strangely positive outlook. The super storm in reality took its time to manifest itself so when it finally arrived, i...

   The owner continues to give me dark looks whenever he catches up with me at either office. He acted strange before his trip to Europe, but then seemed fine again the day after his return, prior to finding out she had resigned. Now he’s back to acting peculiar again, suspicious, the way he acted when he searched my computers – as if driven by the need to find something. He seems to be acting in a vacuum, and not just suspicious of me. He seems not to trust our former temporary boss either, which may explain why he keeps him in the dark about much of what goes on, even sometimes when it affects his job. knowledge is power and keeping other people in the dark is an art form in this place. While the owner has always been somewhat nasty to those who work for him, he seems worse now, deliberately putting distance between us, almost as if he’s distracted. He goes out of the main office more often, and sometimes does not come in at all, skipping the staff meetings which i...