AD Sullivan journal 2013

  I barely caught up with her last poem, when she posted another. Since I could not print it out this morning, I had only a vague memory of it as I went through the day, getting the impression that, while not exactly positive, the poem reflected a brief respite in the sequence of poems in which she still struggled with her apparent relationship. She clearly wants to save it. The poem, of course, returns to a well-established them of “the moment” and in this case, finding a period of time when she has set aside the worries of her life and is basking in the glow of “now” rather than the past or what might occur in the future. While not completely devoid of resignation, the poem suggest acceptance and being in a good space where she can look out from a more objective view point, and has found temporary peace, but a piece from which she will eventually emerge and plunge back into the emotional turmoil of her life. She doesn’t matter, neither do the things that should nor do...

  “Love is a rose, but you better not pick it, only grows when it’s on the vine,” Neil Young once sang. This is the song that ran through my head when I read her latest posted poem, a poem that seems on the surface to be a social commentary about class and status, but in reality, appears to be much more. You don’t use the rose image without dredging up an entire history of romance. The poem takes place in a mythical wealthy suburban landscape where there are no sidewalks, and so no riffraff, or for that matter any pedestrians who might pause and sniff at the fragrant roses planted there. Stopping to smell the roses is a metaphor for appreciation of life, the goodness we have, and taking time to notice the small but significant things that make like pleasant. The irony of the town’s name and the fact that nobody can actually appreciate life is no accident in this poem. But it is important to notice how the poem uses the roses, and later “the rose,” and creates a dynamic ...

      In a modification of the old Clinton era philosophy in regard to gay people in the military, I’m operating on the philosophy, don’t ask and so nobody will tell. I’m trying to keep my nose out of her town except where I need to in order to write my column. If I talk to someone, I don’t ask about her, and so, that part of life has become a blind alley. I know very little at this moment about what transpires with her in town hall, and I’m not pursuing it. If someone volunteers information, I listen to it, but fortunately, she has not come up in any recent conversations – and that alone says something about how little important a role she plays. I can imagine (without evidence to support this) she must be very frustrated, like being caught in a stopped elevator, unable to go up or down or even escape the circumstances – she must wait things out to see if a new opportunity emerges. Her poetry, however, provides a glimpse of her personal life (if there is ever a...

    Apparently, she has found a ray of hope finally if you can believe her latest poem, an extremely ironic and at the same time provocative poem about the possibility of redemption. Redemption might be the wrong word. Rebirth fits better, in a particular way, however. After significant emotional ups, and mostly downs, this poem indicates some sense of leveling off, and a possibility of salvaging a relationship she previously assumed as lost. In the space of a day, she seems to have swung from complete despair to hopefulness, not just for herself, but also her companion. Is it possible to return to a state of innocence – a re-conception, prior to the bite of the apple that sent her life into a tail spin and the much hoped for relationship into ruin. The poem makes heavy use of one of the most controversial elements of the Christian faith – God’s impregnation of the Virgin Mother. It’s use in this poem in reference to herself is ironic when she makes reference to ...

  Written April 2013     Paulo Coelho’s influence on her is unmistakable. This is especially true when it comes to the idea of living the moment, a pervading theme in many of her poems, sometimes even to the point of frustration when she cannot accomplish it. In Coelho’s best-selling book, there is a scene in which the hero is headed across the desert with the aim of finding a treasure near the pyramids in pursuit of his fate. War is being waged nearby among the tribes. The hero and the caravan he is traveling is on the verge of reaching an oasis. This a stage in his journey from his first contentment as a sheep herder. He was convinced to travel to the pyramids but made it only so far before his small savings were stolen, though he eventually made out by helping a crystal merchant. At this stage in his quest, he travelled by caravan towards what he is assuming his ultimate goal. They are camped outside the oasis after struggling through the desert and the t...

    (For some reason, she removed this poem from her site not long after she posted it, raising questions in my mind as to what significance it had. All the previous poems she removed tended to reveal something she did not want exposed. But this poem seemed to reflect an ongoing struggle, and not a particular secret unless I miss something when I reread it.)     In my rush to examine her latest song and her poem about drifting, I skipped over a couple of incredibly powerful poems she posted in late March. This rush of mostly sad poems started after her brilliant success with the women’s event, and that amazing trio of lust/love poems, written about a married man she sought to get involved in and apparently was successful in doing so, but not without a cost. These swings of fortune or misfortune strongly affect the mood of her poems. Her amazingly seductive poems were quickly followed by poems of – if not despair then – depression, a kind of revaluation of...

    I keep thinking I’m being cruel with my observations, when I really do not want to be. Again, I’m working on the Einstein study of an atom -- which essentially is trying to figure out how a watch works without actually opening it up to see what’s inside. And she’s far more complicated than any watch or atom, or even possibly the universe itself (yes, I exaggerated). Complicating the matter are my own basic flaws, which bring an emotional element into a study that should be entirely emotionless. I sometimes jump to conclusions based not on fact, but on my feelings. Never a good thing. She is complex enough. Her role in the political world of the Virgin Mayor and such, and then her role in her private life, and then her role as an artist. All of these things get mixed together, her ambition to achieve as her job and in her art, and her need for love. Love, self-love, the love of others seems to be the engine that drives her life, disguised in other forms ...

      I think the Cat Woman analogy yesterday was a bit harsh. She is not like the leather ladies who want weak men to suck their toes. She likes strong men over whom she has power to control, not with a whip and chain, but with just a look. I suspect everything she does seems to be about control, the control she wants, control she can’t have, control over others, and perhaps even the lack of control she has over aspects of her own life. None of this is as bad as it sounds, even though early on it shocked me, because I knew less about how the real world worked than she obviously does. She has an amazing presence, even she sometimes doesn’t seem aware of. People gravitate towards her, often unaware that they are doing so. This may explain why there is such a black hole at the meeting table where she used to sit, some of her cosmic energy still lingering there and people – especially men (including myself) keep looking there as if expecting to see her still se...

  I realize I made some big assumptions yesterday in my other journal about D and may simply be jealous the way I was last August, when I assumed she was making it with every guy under the sun, and – even after all of the insanity – I had wished one of those guys had been me. I still recall one particular powerful moment in August when I was perched (Harry Potter like) at my desk under the stair and saw her getting ready to go out. She wore large sunglasses and an amazing summer dress, and all kinds of visions went through my head, intensely erotic and painful, since again I assumed she could have anyone and everyone, with me as the permanent outcast. My imagination had painted her with a broad brush, depending on the moment. Sometimes, I saw her as a kind of Cat Woman from Batman, decked out in skin tight leather from stiletto heels to a leather mask with cat ears, and underly powerful force to whom men automatically capitulated. I’ve learned since mostly from her poem...

   Becoming clear from reading her recent poetry is how unfair it is to have a married man in love with her, and worse, her with him. She wants him to be with her when she needs him most, and he rarely is. He might take her for a weekend romp to places like Ocean Grove where they might share a bed in the luxury of inns like the Majestic, when it comes to the miserable and lonely mid-week nights when she needs his arms around her, he always has to leave in order to get back to his wife and kids, leaving her to endure the long, lonely hours when the ghosts haunt her at night all by herself. What she wants is to sit with him on the coach, watching her favorite TV show together, or listening to her favorite music, his arms around her shoulders, her head leaning on his. She doesn’t even need the inevitable transition from living room to bedroom. In fact, she might even dread it since this signals the approach of the time when he will have to get up, get dressed and get ou...

    Written in March 2013   While I love her poetry, I keep going back to her music again and again. Part of this is because it is so pure in the sense that is has nothing to do with any of the conflicts over the last year, and absolutely nothing to do with me. This is something voyeuristic, as if I am seeing her in love with someone long, long ago, and taking guilty pleasure in how she expresses some of her deepest emotions. Not all of her songs are happy, in fact, very few of them are. But I keep going back most often to one that seems to be happier than most, describing soft breezes and sunlight, and the sound of “her” sighs,” moon light and soft seas. It is almost as if she is describing herself, and her powerful voice evokes tender feelings, even if it is unclear who – if anyone – she is singing to, “She moves me out of the silence and into the wonders of the night,” and appears to an affirmation that love has the potential for the positive, “how much...

    Even as she posts a video on her YouTube channel about her work place environment, she posts a poem about almost utter despair. So, we get two realities, the surface world where she portrays herself as part of the team (she posed for a photo with the rec department all in blue t-shirts) and the other inner reality, a world of lost hope, a place to which she regularly retreats when the world comes to naught. The pattern of her poetry over the last month displayed huge highs and now, deep lows, due apparently to the high hopes she had for a particular romance and how it slowly fell to pieces – especially over that man’s apparent reaction to someone’s suicide. Tragedy often reveals aspects of character that are not evident in other situations. There is another duality as suggested in my journal entry yesterday between her personal love life and her ambition for success, and how sometimes, they intermingle, and when one thing fails so does the other. She has been in ...

     A full year after all of the insanity started, I’m only beginning to put the pieces together, and how I have misread so much over the whole of it, sometimes wary of traps that never existed. This is not to say that she isn’t a player. She knows how to make the system work, but seems after all the pain expressed, all of the restless nights, all of the hamster in her brain mornings, she pays a dear price for trying to get ahead. And sometimes, when love comes – as it appears to have over the last month or so – it comes with a booby trap, that causes the whole thing to self-destruct. Sometimes, I mistook her as a maser game player, someone who could work the system and get what she wants from it, when it seems she is scrambling all the time to put together the pieces of a puzzle without knowing what the puzzle picture looks like and so ends up with a picture like nothing she ever figured on in her head, and she ends up with something less than she had in the first place...

    I have to be careful of wishful thinking and reading into things she posts. Some of her poems strike me in a particular way, and I go off pondering them as if they have more personal meaning when I know they don’t. This is especially true when it comes to her music, most of which was – fortunately – created long before I first heard them, about all the previous loves of her life. But once in a while, she throws a curve ball, by writing or recording a new song, which – early on last year I wondered maybe… As far as I know she has written or recorded only two maybe three songs over the last year, with the rest from before her first solo performance live in 2007, some dating back to when she still considered herself a folk singer and prior to when her husband helped produce them into something spectacular. None of the four, original or covers done since last April had anything to do with me but seem more a reflection of where she was at any particular time – inclu...

      The poem she posted next has a very remote point of view, what seems to be someone making an objective observation, far different – apparently – from the intensely internal poems she most often posts. The poem is about the ruins nobody pays attention to, the dust swept up by the wind into piles. It comes off as an impersonal description of an everyday scene, but in reality, it is a metaphor for an intense internal feeling, perhaps a description of the wreckage of her life, as the remains of a demolished building which people largely ignore, not a plea for help so much as testimony to her current condition, in the aftermath of the intense feeling of success followed by an equally intense feeling of failure. The poem is a snap shot of a ruined landscape where demolition or some other disaster exposed the inner trappings of someone’s life. Now, after the fact, passers by take little notice of the details, weaving through the ruins to some destination even as ...