Return of the queen May 2013

 


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 of sticky situations.

If this is directed at me, then she may well be blaming me for her current troubles, as if perhaps had I not gotten in her way while she still worked at our office, her life may well have turned out completely different (an unlikely conclusion on her part since she’s always found a way to self-destruct, long before I entered from stage left.)

In this interpretation “getting her” means catching her as if in a game of cat and mouse.

If the poem is aimed at someone else, then it reflects some ongoing relationship I’m not aware of.

Assuming I am the focus of the poem, then she is assuming that I have actively sought to ruin one of her schemes, perhaps reflecting her still unresolved effort to get into the inner circle of the Virgin Mayor and RR to make herself a player, only to have this on the verge of unraveling as her mayor faces possible jail time. Perhaps she is referring to other insiders who she feels have denied her her rightful place, making it clear that RR and others are much better at playing these insider games than she is.


   2012 menu 

email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Hoping for the best June 24, 2013

Image
        I feel sorry for everybody involved in this trickle up game, not just the so called victims (we walk into    these things with our eyes open and are taken advantage of only because we have our own lusts we can’t control), but also our poet, who knows no other way of life, and must abide by the rules of a game she finds herself stuck in – and must do what she needs to do in order to retain any sense of self-worth. This is what she is, and this is what she must do. But even at her worst, her poetry suggests she is hardly the rascal the congressman’s PR person makes her out to be. She plays the hand of cards she gets dealt. She sometimes misreads the deck, such as assuming that her chef friend in New York was competent, when he was anything else but that. She also leaped onto the bandwagon when it came to our former temporary boss, assuming he could do more for her than it turns out he could, his temporary condition making him of little more use than a...
Read more

Ships that pass in the night July 9, 2013

Image
  A mentioned yesterday, there is more going on in regard to her latest poem than just the content. Again, we come to the possibility that our posts are somehow some kind of secret communication, wishful thinking on my part, of course, because I know she really hates me. I suspect I am deluding myself with hopeful thinking that she has maintained this one thin thread of communication between us, though this poem adds increasing evidence to that illusion – since I posted a poem that in some respects foreshadowed the one she posted this week. My poem included a video of me wandering a small beach in Jersey City near Liberty State Park, and was intended as a response to even earlier poem about borrowed lives. The poem goes I find no path among these river stones, so I make my own, turning this way then that, side steps that lead me nowhere, then back, my life made up of clumps like these small eddies filled with seaweed and people I need, but never see again when I move ...
Read more

Take me to the river July 7th, 2013

Image
  I'll go into the possible inspiration later for this poem she posted today for now she is once more delving into the concept of a row isolation and the struggle to retain strength during several years of adversity her geography is located next to a river named after Henry Hudson as she draws on an important metaphor for life as she lives it similar to an earlier poem that had her kneeling beside the sea in order to let things go, she can no longer retain in her life the wide Hudson with its never ending ripples sits on her doorstep a safe place she goes to breathe new life into her war worn bones and hot raw nerves she goes to the river side to keep from bursting what she is full to spilling and to avoid leaking out and wasting the essence of survival she cannot afford to lose the last few years she says have been truly deep and rough like the storms that rip across the river at times I'm strong she writes but sometimes I'm tired on the shore she watches the ships...
Read more