AD Sullivan journal 2013

  The poems she’s posted over the last few months have created an echo in my head that took me a while to pin down, more heard than read, which naturally sent me back to her archive of music, where I found in some of her songs some of the same conflicts as she seems to be experiencing now. Not as intense maybe, yet always with the same self-doubt. One song of these struck me more powerfully than others in this regard. It is not my favorite song, yet hauntingly familiar, and talks about the inability to come to terms as to what each lover wants or needs. Like many of her other songs, this one is a kind of contemporary jazz, although not with a homage to pop with piano, bass, some guitar and a smooth piano solo at its center. She riffs through the verses and conclude each chorus with a skat that helps provide the song its structure, and eventually concludes with an extended held and fading not that suggests something unresolved. We get image of young night and out of the ...

      Looking back at some of her previously posted poems, I come to wonder if they are completely about her relationship, and perhaps just a bit about the chaotic work environment she has landed in. Everybody has to be pointing fingers at everybody else looking for someone to blame when in fact they all are, each seeking to get his or her piece of the political pie – not completely understanding just how unreliable the Virgin Mayor can be. So, when she posts a poem about an upside down world, she may well be speaking about her faulting relationship, but also about what goes on in her everyday life. Although I believe my original assessment is correct, the poem also suggests how she – thinking she would become a player – maybe have been left out or under appreciated by the people she had teamed up with. There is a sense of changing priorities on a day to day basis, new rules replacing old rules, when none of the rules make sense. The scary part is that she has...

  After weeks of whining, she finally told herself to top, leaping back onto the treadmill to keep herself occupied. The romance – as intense as it once was – is clearly dead, if not buried, and she clearly has decided to get on with her life. “It’s not like you hadn’t expected this to fall apart in your face anyway,” she writes in her latest post. She is making lemonade now that life has handed her yet one more lemon. Her salvation comes with routine, keeping her pace going, trying desperately to catch her breath. She has another side of her life, a public side, duties to perform, people to shore up, pledges to honor, disasters to avert – a bit of hyperbole perhaps and yet always a cure for personal misery – especially if she takes the stance that other people have deeper troubles than she does. The lemonade comes with the fact that she is not alone; she has people who care about her, people who help keep her from falling. A slew of people she hadn’t expected to ...

    The poem she posted a couple of days ago (and I’m just getting to it now) raises some serious questions about my poetic conclusions over the last few months. It is possible that I may have mistakenly attributed all of these poems (from keeping her love locked in her head) to her most recent posting to the same married man. In her most recent posting, there is one line that raises other even more significant questions as to just how far this romance progressed, whether or not all or some of the poems are directed at one man or several. None of these things changes the fact that she is in a downward spiral, approaching emotional disaster, which she is well aware of yet unable to avoid. Whom ever this man is, she clearly has fallen head over heals in love with him and may be forced to alter her poem from last August in which she claimed to have loved only four people in her life – that number is clearly five as of today. And this love appears to be slipping away. ...

    If rumor be true, then another shoe is about to drop on the Virgin Mayor as the result of an FBI raid over a fundraising event he held last year. The Virgin Mayor apparently pressured school officials to buy and sell tickets to the event at $1,000 a pop. This came about the same time the Virgin Mayor and his son hacked into the website of their political enemy in February 2012. The raid, if true, puts even more pressure on the Virgin Mayor to resign. Between yesterday and today, other stuff has happened. I had intended to highlight a somewhat vague poem (none of her poems are really vague) she had posted, and will, but she has since posted one much more specific. Between the two and other information, we might get a glimpse of what transpires behind the scenes. The outgoing public safety director told my Freeholder friend that RR has been running the police department with the blessing of the Virgin Mayor, make the police director completely useless. “I t...

    After she posted her recent poem about her friends in Haverton, I went scrambling back to a poem she posted earlier this year that I realize only after the fact that it was about him, too – startling only because I failed to see it my first time analyzing the poem. This was a poem about her guardian angel, someone she sometimes forgets but is always there for her, even in spirit when she is alone. Just knowing he is somewhere out in the world comforts her, a guardian angel, who I knew about from last fall, but didn’t put him together with this poem until she posted the new poem last week to him. The previous poem back in March talked about having his “remembered arms” around her, and I mistakenly assumed (always foolish to assume) that the poem was written to a lover. In way, he is more than a lover. He is a central figure in her life who lifts her up whenever she falls and bruises her knees., whenever she has “fallen again.” He tells her. In a previous journ...

      Needless to say, her poem telling someone he ain’t gonna get it no way no how shook me because it brought me back to the warry days of last summer when I thought everything I did or said was a potential mine field – or quick sand as she put it. The hit from Haverton convinced me she is still looking at my website and so I’m back to the mine set of thinking anything she posts – or more importantly, anything I do to react, is a trap. It’s moments like this when I appreciate my cyber nanny and the fact that I keep most of my reactions locked away in a poetry journal. What she doesn’t see can’t hurt me. This paranoia has been re-examining poems I thought I had already figured out, searching for clues to some other more nefarious meaning I did not detect during my first analysis. As with my previous attempts to find a connection between her poems and me, I come up empty. Whatever emotional crisis she is undergoing, it does not have to do with me. Her world is...

   We come back to where she was last fall, if for different reasons, down and out, not in Paris, but in her own misery. So, it is not surprising that she would post a poem to her oldest and dearest friend in Haverton, apparently someone she always turns to when her world falls apart, someone I went into more detail in journal entry last fall and mentioned in previous journal about her searching out my website. This is a friend she grew up with, greatly admires, and has come to trust. This explains the drastic shift in tone from her previous poem, trading extreme bitterness for intense tenderness and affection. She has nowhere else to go, so she goes home – not to her biological family, but to someone as closer or closer than her biological brother. This poem is a lot like a letter home (even though by all indications, she actually made the trip to see him). She is playing off the old cliché of “a penny for your thoughts” converting this to how much of a collecti...

    I was wrong. She didn’t take the photo she posted at her father’s house, but at her best friend’s house in Haverton, Pennsylvania, and the dog pictured, is most likely his. This ties into the poem she posted to him – the analysis of which I’ll probably do tomorrow, since it says a lot about her curtain condition. She apparently used her iPad to check my webpage late last night or early this morning, looking over a few pages I posted about modern feminism. This came via a google search rather than the typical entry via my blog page link. This is not the first time I’ve caught her searching out my content, even though I’ve posted very little (consciously) about her since the summer. Her IP address shows up so rarely, I assumed she had moved on from thinking about me. In recent months, I have caught her on my pages only one other time. Perhaps she thought it was safe for her to look at my pages from Haverton, suggesting that perhaps over these months she had been on...

  Guilt, if her current poem can be believed, can be as complex as love, and clearly, she has moved beyond the point of redeeming lost love. She seems to fight back against the idea that she did anything wrong. She seems to blame the social rules, which deny her what she wants and needs. She suggests that when it comes to love, there is injustice in denying her. She seems to be seeking a way to cope with the pain of her failed romance, and the poem takes the next step in a slow, downward trajectory. This is a very bitter poem and seems determined to find something if not someone to blame for her misery. To some degree, she blames herself for her forgetting what she has always needed to do to survive. If she could get what she wanted in a world that is so compromised, she would feel better, some consolation for living in an otherwise unfair world. Yet, she cannot get around the fact that the man she loves is already married, and this somehow puts her in the wrong for wan...

  Her latest posted poem makes me think of some of the last scenes of the 1997 film “Titanic” – not the disaster stuff, but that moment when she is floating on the debris and her lover is in the water beside her, slowly drifting apart. Her poem is about resignation, finally accepting the reality of a situation, and the next step in the slow dissolution of a relationship she once had high hopes for. This moves beyond the point of her clinging to hope, or even begging for him to reconsider. She accepts the romance as a lost cause and admits that the affair has had less desirable side effects. She opens the poem asking, “Where does the dreaming go,” after it gets smacked by reality, turning it into dust. She clearly feels embarrassed by how she fooled herself and how she ought to have known better – optimistic thoughts she says now she had no right to think. Again, we come to the bitter bit where she made assumptions about him, and his marriage, and how her relationship ...

  From resignation to rage is not as big a step as one might believe. Taken in the contest of the series of poem’s she has posted over the last two months, you have to think this is the next step in the ever-deteriorating situation and what was once great passion has turned into deep bitterness. Had she posted this poem a year ago after the debacle at the bar, I would have better as intimidated by it as I was about the forgiveness poem she directed at me during the summer. It is difficult to say if the target of this poem feels as deeply humiliated by it as I felt back then. Somehow, I suspect not – even though this poem and many of the previous poems aimed at him suggest that she once perceived him as a man of great sensitivity. Again, the caveat here is the presumption that all of these recent poems were about the same man, and that this sensitive man she fell so hard for has finally done something   beyond the pale, so that there is no longer a plea to remain to...