A D Journal 2012

    As the official photographic chronicler of the fund raiser, she did not appear in any of the photos she took, yet managed to isolate and identify all of the important people behind the scenes, an important gift she’ll never realize she game me. The irony, of course, is that other people took pictures of her taking pictures, exposing her as a behind the scenes player as well – a role I suspect she might actually like. It is impossible from the photographs to tell if these movers and shakers actually take her seriously or dismiss her as glorified secretary, someone the Virgin Mayor hired out of pity. Her poetry suggests she has little or no power, and equally little respect. Ironically, she had more power while outside the administration while working for us than she has now. How long she will tolerate her unimportant role remains to be seen. She is not someone who likes being made to feel small. Even when she plays the role of needing to be mentored, she has her e...

      (written February 2013)   I must have listened to this song of hers a million times (a gross exaggeration, but a few hundred times might not be), without fully realizing its full impact, or even what the song is really about. I took it for a typical heart break song – even though her brilliant singing supported by well-crafted jazz-like musical arrangement made it more than typical pop stuff from the radio. As with her poetry, however, the song and its performance says a lot about her and her past, how detached she can appear on the surface even when internally in total emotional turmoil. Even more so, the song reveals a past that is full of love won and love lost, of deception and self-deception, and depth of anguish and her ability to strike back through her art. The song seems to show her ability to maintain her public composure even when she is being torn apart emotionally in private. The song is being sung to someone she clearly loved, but ...

   I know this sounds silly, but when I first met her cats when I first went up to her apartment, I thought I had stepped into a scene from Bell, Book and Candle; she was a witch, and her cats her familiars – a vague notion I still have since she seems to be able to cast a spell over those who come into her life. Even the art work on the walls of her apartment (most of it her own) reminds me of the shop in the movie, and she has the same air as that witch, as if she knows she can cast a spell on people and there is nothing any of those who fall under it can do about it. Her cats rub against the legs of the men who come into her life to see if they are worth, and perhaps enhance the atmosphere that consumes them, helping her to make it hard for those men to think – not drunk on the wine she serves, but their own hormone she stirs up, which makes them stagger around her witch’s den, not able to come or go without her guidance. A man goes in at his own peril and emerges fro...

  I keep reading her poem about the search for reason, like an archaeologist searching through the ruins of the past for clues for today, thinking back to when I thought things had a reason, as if life provides reason for good or bad, right or wrong, as if reason is remotely reasonable when it comes to being human, or even real. You can grasp it in the palm of your hand, feeling it quiver, filled with expectations of making sense when all it does is stir something up inside you that you can’t control, when in fact is it you trembling and not this other thing we clutch, the vibration, the terrible ache for it never satisfied except maybe when you rock it to sleep, cuddle with it, accepting it as you press against it, and yet even then it remains a stranger, lying beside you in your bed, beyond “reason,” although you imagine you can feel it or taste it, like old wine lingering on the tip of your tongue, possibly elegant, often bitter, but never real, no matter how hard we caress ...

      It is always the same, this duality, double meaning, the saying of one thing and meaning another, the injected little tidbits of suggestion, and yet not what they imply at all, or perhaps exactly what intended, but disguised to be denied later if question. I am the crazy man from September, or perhaps I am not, now painted as the impatient fool, and yet maybe not, engaged in what may or may not be a game of cat and mouse, she with her broad whiskers and sharp white teeth poised outside the hole in which I hide for the moment I poke my nose out and firmly find myself in her mouth, devoured perhaps, a hint of a savage game she is far superior than I to play, if real or not, she relying on my inability to resist the cheese laid out before me temptingly before the hole, the irresistible I must resist if I am to survive, far worse last summer when I foolishly took the bait, nearly getting my head chopped as she sat before the falling knife knitting up some new plot, of...

      I’m amazed at how much different things seem in retrospect, as I look back at notes for poems I was never brave enough to post, poems that seemed to encapsule particular moments when a choice could have altered the universe, and reflected intense feelings I was too scared to express at the time (perhaps still am). A moment of choice such as that one early on when she sent me photographs of her and her friend in her apartment, and the images I concocted in my head of their love -making, as if she had tied me up in a corner to make me watch. “The heat of it,” I wrote in those old notes, “burning inside of me, the need of it, the in and out of it, in which I cannot take part, feeling that same ache to seek the soft inside where the world closes in around you, but where you can never remain, drawn out again by cosmic forces only to force your way back in, in a never-ending in and out, the intruder making unwelcome (or even welcome) advances, seeking to remain when...

   As noted in this journal from a few days ago, I’ve been inspired to look back at some of her old songs as if they are poetry. If have, of course, listened to some of these songs thousands of times since she gave me the CD a year ago, only to realize that some the songs posted on some online accounts weren’t on the original CD, and, and in fact, had been recorded much more recently than when the originals were back perhaps in 2005. These stand out partly because of the difference in production value since the CD music was produced by her husband, a very capable musician in his own right, while a few later pieces she apparently recorded in her apartment, one using a piano she kept in her kitchen, the other using a guitar she apparently received as a gift in late April last year. The guitar work is simple, using minimal effects, perhaps reverb. But her voice is so powerful, it gives the song its own sense of orchestration as she raises emotions a lesser performer could...

    Power begets power. Attaining power is difficult, and keeping it, as much a struggle, needs money to build it. This is the reason the Virgin Mayor needed to do his fundraiser and why those around him cling to his nearly kingly robes. But it was a surprise that the owner of the venue allowed RR to attend since RR once tried to shake him down for protection money when he was still a cop, and what eventually drew the attention of the feds to him, setting the stage for his big lie, one he would tell over and over again, how he worked undercover to help bring down the police chief, when all he really did was turn in his own friends in the department. Although I was also invited to the swank affair, I chose not to for obvious reasons – she would be there, decked out, an amazingly beautiful distraction I did not need to engage at this moment in time, just when it’s taken so many months to recover from her. Ironically, I passed the doors to the place on my way to a rare ...

  I don’t know why it took so long for me to closely examine her music the way I have with her poems, especially because I never stopped listening to her music from the day she gave me her CD early last year, listening to it over and over in my car during my long drive to the auxiliary office and back, and when the CD wore out, I listened on line – something my owner no doubt took note of when he perused by work computer. Why I picked this song to examine first is also a mystery. It is not my favorite by far, regardless of how brilliantly performed, a jazz piece in which she does some serious scat singing. Perhaps it is because the theme is so similar to her later poems about living in the moment and has vague echoes of her meeting the old woman on that cruise and how she later wore through appointment books – and not with lists of laundry. There is an intense brutality exploited by the harsh piano and competing guitar, as if two knights were dealing for the affections of t...

      A once-great psychist one claimed the study of an atom is a lot like trying to figure out how a watch works by never being able to open the watch to look. I feel about the same when I try to figure how what is going on in her life when I read her poems. The pattern of her poetry has changed dramatically from the summer when she seemed perpetually enraged at me. Over the last few months, she seems to reflect frustration of being trapped in a life she did not intend to end up in, and the poem she posted today is more of the same. In this, she continues what appears to be an internal dialogue with herself, if not so much trying to understand the reasons behind her internment (as was the case in the poem she posted last week), then more of a bitter commentary on her current condition, displaying an intense sense of melancholy, asking herself why she puts up with it all, sacrificing her immediate needs both financially as well her goals for the future. What i...

  There is intense sadness in all of this, trying to make sense of how a person as immensely talented at she is, gets trapped into horrible situations like the one she appears to be trapped in. She is not alone, of course, just much more talented in so many more areas than other people I know, who had lost their way. I’m most struck by her poetry, writing and music. She apparently is a good an artist as she is a poem and as good a photographer as she is an artist. So, what went wrong? Her poetry talks about giving up on finding love and spending her life alone, something her Facebook account seemed to reflect when she reopened it up to public scrutiny. How much of this is real or permanent, I can’t tell. But she certainly is involved in a conflict with someone, and it’s horrible to think that someone with so much love to give shouldn’t be able to find anybody worthy to receive it. I listen to her music and feel the passion in each of her songs and wonder if she wrote ...

  At heart, she is a scared little girl, trying to keep her vulnerability secret, someone who wants someone to sit with her and hold her through the night, keeping her company on her couch or in her bed, someone she can count on to be there when her hamster brain goes haywire in the early morning hours. And to date, she hasn’t found a man (or a woman) who has lived up to that expectation. Men mostly use her, and then go home to their wives, leaving her to spend the lonely night in anticipation of what the early morning hours will bring. She doesn’t mind the sex, but it disparate for the affection, the tender touch, the caress that is more than just a come-on, something more meaningful than foreplay. Yes, she wants to feel important and to be recognized for her talents, but she also wants to be appreciated as a woman, not just for sex. Each time she invites someone up to her apartment, she expects it to turn out that way, hoping that man or woman will spend the night, cudd...

  When you talk about a spy in the house of life, you can’t help but mean people like the salesman, J, who is without a doubt attracted to her, but may be scared he might blow it with his current girlfriend if he makes a move. I get the impression she’s attracted to him as well, at least; she liked hanging out in his corner of the office when she still worked there. And now that she’s gone, he’s one of those she still maintains contact with, including our former temporary boss, the owner, outgoing writer, A, and, of course, the office gossip. Yet from my brief conversation with our former temporary boss last week, her contact with these people may be minimal, an occasional comment on social media, or in the case of our former temporary boss, an occasional call on the phone – just enough to keep him interested (the way the guy from the shelter is still interested). Our owner, however, most likely has the most contact physically, but gauging from the conversation in Faceboo...

   Without a real clear indication of what exactly is going on in her life except that she has had a falling out with someone, most like RR – although it could be anybody – her latest poem is no great surprise. Life is crazy for her, and worse, trying to find a reason for it, only makes it even more insane. As she has done in the past, the poem is an internal dialogue that appears to be two parts of her discussing the situation. One part of her is desperate for a reason; the other part claims searching for a reason may be why she is going crazy and wants to just let it all go and move on. This appears to be the culmination of a series of poems that have depicted like going from bad to worse, while she struggles with day to day living. While this poem is not about her getting stuck in an insignificant role, it is more about coping with a bad situation, with an overwhelming sense of craziness and her struggle to make sense of it all, part of her needing to know the reaso...

   None of this can be about me – although her posting and other internet moves seem to indicate that I am somehow involved. For instance, she deleted all of her likes, comments and personal uploaded videos of her brother, mother and friend from high school from the YouTube account to which I am subscribed. This may simply be coincidence since it is clear that she is in the middle of a romantic falling out with someone, most likely RR, in which she has an ongoing exchange – or at least, I hope so. Yesterday morning, she posted an image that says, “I’m sorry if you don’t like my honesty, but to be fair, I don’t like your lies.” Again, this may well be a pattern of her life, always engaging in the same conversation with people, but part of my conversation with her involved her telling me things about her other romantic and sexual engagements, and something I asked about with our former temporary boss. But since she tends not share information in that way, this probab...

    The noose around her world tightens, at least for members of the Virgin Mayor’s inner circle, some of whom got indicted yesterday for taking kickbacks when they worked for a campaign in Newark. Two of the mayor’s closest associates include his official PR person (not her), the local insurance guy – to whom the mayor gives all the town’s insurance business These two have a number of business interconnections, including a woman along with her husband has been accused of money laundering through their firm’s office in Clifton. She served as an aide for the Newark campaign, run by the PR guy. She is also an executive for the insurance company and is instrumental in dealing with the Virgin Mayor. Our former writer boasts about being hired on as the mayor’s personal assistant and PR person but is in fact working under the PR guy from Newark, and so, by default, is by a very narrow degree of separation, in close proximity to this scandal. She is discovering the hard...

    (written early February 2013) Something is definitely amiss in Oz, if my readings of her posts from her Facebook site are any indication. Again, I’m not sure why she opened her account to the public again after panicking a few weeks go when she discovered we were connected. Perhaps she feels safe and that I no longer have access to see her public postings but needs to site to send messages to one of her other victims. She is fully aware that I read her poetry postings on her blogger account, and perhaps tailors each to specific people. But in some ways, both poetry and Facebook communicate similar messages, although Facebook appears to be saying it more openly – although not too directly – and appears to suggest that there has been a significant change within her enclave, although just what this is, I can’t say. Two of her more recent poems from the blogger site hinted at some change, and conflict, but it is not possible to know from them what transpired. Thi...