Alone again naturally Aug. 27, 2012

 

What comes across most out of this study of her poetry is a pattern of self-perception.

She apparently sees herself as savvy, street wise player destined for greatness, someone who when gets her foot in the door of an establishment, is bound and determine not to stop until she gets to the top. And it doesn’t stop there

She told one of the office gossips that our office was just a stepping stone to some other bigger and better career opportunity. Which is just as well because in an office as small as ours there really isn’t any place for her to ascend to – unless she is looking to replace the boss and take her corner office. But the boss really is a savvy street fighter and I doubt she will be moved by a new comer after having invested nearly a decade getting herself to the top as she has.

Unless the owner creates a new position, there is no place for a new comer to go without pushing someone else out.

I don’t count myself in that since I’m have no real clout, something I think she mistook when she came after me back in March.

In the past, she has always wound up in places where there was room at the top, where she could move effortlessly from novice to pseudo boss.

In her poems, she depicts herself as victim or heroine, on a personal crusade to greatness.

She wants to be in control, not just of her inner self, but of the circumstances in which she is forced to exist, and she has learned routines that help her weave through this maze of other people’s intentions, time giving her the unique ability to outsmart and out maneuver people who might otherwise want to do her harm.

Yet for as savvy as she claims to be, she is also naïve, looking for that Cinderella end that never comes. She gets used by players who seem savvier than she is, and in almost every poem there is this intense desire for control, how to keep her life as her own, when in almost all cases, it seems to slip away from her.

There is great pain in some of her poems, legitimate pain, some clearly caused by me, although not always intentionally. There is fear, too, of dark things on the periphery of her existence she can’t see or describe against which she must muster her whole strength to survive.

This comes at great cost – because as some poems show, she is not nearly as ruthless as she needs to be to thrive in the world, she most often finds herself in, some poems showing real empathy even for those she considers her enemy.

Yet, time has taught her she needs to claw her way to get what she wants, and is clever enough, brilliant enough, sometimes ruthless enough to get it for a time, yet as one of her most recent poems points out, there are always people waiting to snatch it back from her.

Ultimately, her poems – going back to before I even met her (and those poems she posted on her previous website years earlier – depict great sadness, since all life stories come to the same end over time, and her poems often reflect the sadness even of the journey itself, for all the company she has, all of the people who profess to love her, of all those who flatter her with complements, she is fundamentally alone.

And the hard part is the fact that she knows it.

 

  2012 menu


email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Swimming with sharks Nov. 3, 2012

Image
  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...
Read more

Almost famous March 3, 2013

Image
    Her latest post on her personal Facebook page still bemoans her lack of fame., saying that she feels as if she has no place in this world. She expresses jealousy of those who have succeeded and get to live the luxurious life – as referred to in that 2003 poem about change of perspective. She wants to be one of the jet set, and get to shuffled ahead of the crowd, even though as that poem pointed out, she used to hate those kinds of people. The fact that she can’t get there (or perhaps back to it) despite all of her talent and how she had done to achieve really, really frustrates her. She just doesn’t seem to be able to come up with a formula for success. I feel sorry for her, partly because if she can’t get what she wants with all of the talent she has, and her ability to work her way up (trickle up) in whatever structure she finds herself in, it is possible she may never get there, having some fundamental flaw that keeps her from finding the right door and the ...
Read more

A man in a fog July 26, 2012

Image
  The male owner has picked up a new habit during the weekly staff meetings he hadn’t had previously, checking his cell phone’s messaging app -- more so this week and I wonder if it has anything to do with her not being at the meeting. She was out on some assignment she had discussed with him earlier and perhaps texted him to keep him apprised of her progress. Looking back to earlier this year, his behavior mirrors mine from back then, as if he’s anxious for the next message to arrive, regardless of what it says. He seemed very distracted by it, even to the point of missing what we reported and forcing him to have us repeat what we said. Having read the synopsis of my journal, he should have had fair warning and found a way to avoid the fog I walked around in – but clearly, he seems as out of touch as I was at that stage. A few times during the meeting, I found him staring hard at me, as if trying to read something from my expression, or perhaps he feels a bit threatened....
Read more