AD Sullivan journal 2013

  It appears she’s taken an extensive weekend off to go visit her best friend in Haverton finally, her childhood companion to whom she always turns when things go sour in her life, and to whom she wrote her penny for your thoughts poem a few weeks ago. This is the second time I caught her snooping at my website from there, back last fall when she ran to him like a wounded animal, hoping he could heal her. There were other times she looked at my site from her own town – most often coming at times when I stopped looking at her web pages – perhaps just a coincidence, who can tell? Most often, the suspicious hits from as a result of Google searches on my name. She might even have adopted software to hide her web signature the way the hometown blogger GA has. I suspect she does, and so when she checks out my site, the report shows her coming from some remote place like Council Bluffs or odd places in Virginia. I suspect she uses similar tracking to be aware of when I visit her...

    It’s amazing. In the space of six months, our staff has gone from all women and one man (the man being me) to all men and one woman, and since the boss does all the hiring, you have to wonder if this was intentional. The boss, who has been out on two maternity leaves, has manipulated behind the scenes to keep her position during the first one, and sabotaged her temporary replacement during the second. This boss also seems to be aware of our male owner’s relationship with our former female reporter (the poet) as well as possible relations with other female members of the staff over the years, and seemed bound and determine to eliminate potential competition in the future. The boss seems to have sensed that our former employee’s moves to trickle up may well have been a threat to become a boss in the future since there are too few power positions in our office in the first place. Management may well have had good reason for firing one of the female reporters (not ...

    To show why I suspect there is sometimes an interplay between what I post and what she posts in apparent response, I’m going to take two recent poems, one I posted and one she posted afterwards. Although I believe my original assessment of her poem is correct, this alternative comparison is a bit suggestive. My poem opens with “If I get to know you from the inside out, what more can I go on about, the real feel under the skin where there is no sin, where no lies lie, my truth and your truth rubbed raw, scraping all that crap that clogs the pores with all that superficial clap trap we can all live without. I don’t want to go in and out, shouting out like a water spout, I want to get in and stick until I know the thick of it, what you are all about, until in is out and flows out my mouth or eyes or pores until I’m soaked sore and know all of you and you me and that’s something to shout about. See?” Her poem starts off “I’d give a penny for every time I could open up ...

    My West Coast cyber nanny got back to me after reading my posts and her posts, and concluded her poems are not a response to mine. For the most part I believe my cyber nanny is right. Most of the details of most of the poems she’s posted since late last year do not fit me at all. But there are rare exceptions which I have detailed in this journal, and raised questions about differing interpretations from those I wrote first, such as some of the poems that came after her affair with the married man ended. I’m still reexamining some of her poems with the eye of finding perhaps a broader interpretation of their meaning. I, of course, still live with the somewhat naïve fantasy that she is posting poems she knows I will read, as if conveying a vision of her inner life so I might come to understand her better. Down deep, I know better. While she may be aware of my interest in her poetry, her motivation has nothing to do with me or my understanding, but the desperat...

  Again, just when I think it’s safe to stick my head up out of my hiding hole, she posts a poem that seems like a response to something I posted, stirring up questions that are even more disturbing if it is true. Ever since last summer, I’ve always pondered the possibility of a trap, as if baiting me into making a move I might regret – such as the one I made on her birthday. Is she trying to get other people to believe I am haunting her, when in fact I am not? Or is all this just my reading into the whole thing something that isn’t there? I would like to think again that there is a conversation going on between us, two scribes trying to make sense of a world, using language few others have the ability to use, only I suspect that’s pure fantasy, too, wishful thinking, a rabbit hole that is too dangerous to descend into. Again, I think back to that meeting with my two owners after she accused me of stalking, and the advice they gave me about ceasing to post poems that she ...

    A little bit more about the poem I wrote about yesterday and then I’ll get on to the newer poems she has since posted and I have neglected in trying to re examine what I might have missed in these older poems. One that is clear, the tone of this poem is starkly different from the defiant tone she struck with her Phoenix poem, yet somehow it still contains the essence of some ideas of the earlier poem, still defiant, still refusing to let go into the night quietly, and perhaps this is motivated by the ebb and flow of anticipated pain, the fear waking from dreams, the desperate need to find strength. Perhaps she deluded herself into believing that if she became an insider she had paved the way to the success she had always craved, or at least won her the respect of her peers. This is a mixture of sadness and bitterness in this and some of the poems leading up to it, and perhaps a search for someone to blame for her failing to obtain the greatness she clearly believ...

    I really have no good reason to revisit this poem about pain anticipated because I believe the original interpretation seems to be valid, concerning her derailed love affair. But like many of her poems, this one may well have a broader meaning that I did not consider during my first go around. The poem seems to describe of what may be a behind the scenes train wreck, a slow motion disaster she can see coming but cannot avoid. While I first saw this as a concluding poem in a series of love poems, it may well reflect the broader fears of what is going on where she is employed, the threat of legal action against her mayor, and how everything is taking place in slow motion, when she would rather see the whole thing happen quickly as to get it over with. She may even see this as a test of her ability to withstand, while insiders count down the days and hours when the whole game comes to an end. At times, she seems to believe she can pull it off, bracing herself agai...

    Since I mention the scribe poem over and over again in these pages, I should look back at it again, just to make certain that it says what I thought it said when I fire wrote about it – since it is the poem that has sent me scurrying to reexamine other of her poems I had first assumed had nothing to do with me (and may still not). Because my first take (second and third takes as well) made the assumption that this poem was aimed at me, I’m going to take a giant step back and evaluate the poem more objectively, making no such assumptions about who it is dedicated to, and focus entirely on what exactly she is saying, and possibly why. The poem is about writing, about creating a world out of words that others may not have the talent or vision to do. These poets make sense of a world that “normal” people might not – and here she seems to begin a theme that she will return to later, about what is worth fighting for – the good fight – or worth putting into words, as sh...

  I won’t pretend to understand what prompts her changes of mood and tone from poem to poem, and if any of it really concerns me at all. Perhaps there is legitimate personal confusion, since she tends to use her poems to send messages that she might otherwise fear to send by other means. Sometimes, I think she is spinning a web, although it is also beyond me what she expects to catch in it when she does. She seems to have hunkered down in her new job, and appears to believe she is part of the inner political circle – and yet as the poem I wrote about yesterday, there seems to be a political divide that keeps her from being with the person she loves. The mentioning of politics in that poem appears to indicate she has taken a side perhaps within an insider dispute. This makes me wonder once again whether or not her moves inside our office and outside were politically orchestrated from the start, or that her actions regarding us may have been more or less controlled by tho...

    I’m only going to briefly revisit her poem about “being over there,” because I suspect my first interpretation was correct. But after being stunned by the sudden appearance of the scribe poem, I find myself doubting what I first believed as the meaning of all her poems and must look at them again, if only in passing to make sure there was not some hidden bit such as she inserted into a few poems last fall. As first interpreted, this poem seems to be most direct, losing the vagueness that she usually incorporates when being sly or seeking to disguise some deeper meaning she might later be able to deny if someone exposes it. There is almost no doubt about how she feels in this poem – and appears to be written as I first indicated – to a lover, perhaps the same man she’d had the affair with earlier this year, or another whom she would like to have one with, but as indicated in the Romeo and Juliet essay, divided by forces beyond both their control. Only an extreme...

    I keep coming back to the same place, even though I started out thinking one thing about a particular poem, only to find the poem may have a different and more nefarious meaning after all. Each new posting makes me reevaluate what I thought before, and threatens to toss whatever I initially though into the proverbial trash bin. What I sometimes see as a self-righteous if not openly hostile tone of some of her most recent poems, may not be at all accurate, including some of the assumptions I’ve made about the poetry’s meaning, leaving me in the unenviable space of not knowing anything at all. So, I have to assume her world is not the way I see it, and that I haven’t a clue as to what is really going on – just guessed that may coincide with personal prejudges – and that somehow I got screwed in this whole mess, when I’m the only who may have screwed her. The only thing clear is that I’m seeing a dramatic shift in tone in her more recent poems. It is impossible to...

      Essentially, our former temporary boss is right about her. She lives her life in terror; and down deep seems to fear men as much as she is attracted to them, assuming the worst as the same time she can’t live without them. She seems to think all men pose a threat, even the unsuspecting and seemingly kind ones, although I still recall her comment last fall at one of our staff meetings when she said she didn’t hate men, she loved men, it was only some men she hated – and looked at me. But she also once said on Facebook that she doesn’t need men, she has her cats. All of that should be old news after so many months without contact, as I thought it was when she found someone to love. She does, however, seem to admire people (men or women) who don’t hit on her. “You’re one of the few politicians who hasn’t hit on me,” she told the Virgin Mayor’s arch rival at one point last year, while telling me much earlier how the Virgin Mayor frequently did. This se...

  I keep revisiting the Phoenix poem because I mistook it’s meaning the first time I tried to interpret and yet, each time I reread it, the poem appears one of the most direct poems she’s written in a while. And yet, even then, it is not completely clear as to exactly what she means. Although I didn’t think so at first, I have since come to believe that the poem – at least on one level – is directed at me, as I am now presuming some of her recent poems also were. Just why is still beyond my comprehension, as it seems to come out of nowhere, and seems to imply a relationship that does not exist – at least, between us. This is the reason I first read this as the aftermath of her shattered relationship. Yet with each new reading, this poem (as well as others) reveal possible underlying meanings I had not previously considered, or ignored in favor of the more easily understandable surface reading. The poem may also be talking about power, and her inability to squeeze out ...

    A fascinating pattern has emerged as someone began probing poems I posted on my blog back in April 2012, at what would have been the height of my brief association with her. If she is the one doing the probing, the question is why: Is she being nostalgic for that all-too-brief time of tranquility, or is she searching for something else? The impression I get is that she is the kind of gal that once she leaves a situation, she never goes back. She moves on. Although at the same time, I suspect if someone is persistent enough, depending on just how safe she feels. If unthreatened, she might even look back at some old romance with some affection, viewing someone with some regret as if a missed opportunity. This may well be true of her stalker from Brooklyn, when at the time she thought she was stuck “frittering every possible bit of energy away into whatever random task/job/relationship” she decided to “codependently sacrifice” herself, or would spend the rest of her...

      Her fairness poem makes me realize just how out of touch with reality I am, something pervious poems of hers suggested, but none hit me so hard in the gut as this one did. Except for when I was young, I lived by all the rules she has come to reject in her last few poems. This may well explain my reaction to her when she began to trickle up at our office a year ago. I saw it as unfair. Maybe I even feared she would wind up my boss, forced to comply with whatever dictates she gave, chained to my desk to wait my next order. I’m not completely clear about my mind set back then, only that I sensed how powerful she was becoming and how it seemed unfair as to how she was obtaining that power. But I did not realize until reading her last few poems just how high a cost she paid in her attempt to achieve power or status, the intense guilt she felt over what she had to do to thrive or even survive in a man’s world. Her liberation poem shocks me because it rings...