Slow leaking Titanic? May 2013

 

 

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 believes she deserves – and she possibly does.

When the Virgin Mayor got elected two years ago, he attracted a pack of bottom feeders, including RR, who saw this as an opportunity to recover his job as a cop. He apparently dragged her along for a ride she might not have intended to take, promising to give her the inside track on everything, when he was barely on the fringe himself.

Some of these poems in subtext may reflect her realization that perhaps she wasn’t on the road to success after all, and yet, she made her bed and needs to make something out of the ashes, a rebirth of a plan that might still get what she wants.

She needs to make something out of lemons, and apparently is in the middle of an organization utterly different from what she was used to, with a pecking order based not on merit but on backstabbing and manipulation, skills she might need to learn if she hopes to survive.

I can’t tell whether what she did in our office was on behalf of this pack of scoundrels, and that she was an insider all along (much the way she served as a spy for RR when she approached the mayor’s Chief Rival offering her services only to take their secrets back to RR). Perhaps she slowly got sucked into the matrix and found herself (at first) and unwitting accomplice who eventually had to choose to jump into the mess with both feet or get left behind.

Perhaps I’ve read all of her motivations wrong and much of what she’s done before, during and after working in our office was a kind of desperate scramble to make lemonade when what she thought she had turned out to be an illusion (similar to what she found out with her stalker chef when she thought she would get somewhere and his bad business practices didn’t even get her livable tips.)

In anticipating pain, she might not be talking about love, as much as she is seeing the same tumbling pieces to the same miserable puzzle falling into place again. But this time, she’s stuck on the Titanic and will have to ride out the storms with the hope the boat doesn’t sink before she can find landfall and other options.

This is also a slow moving pain, a slow leak in the Virgin Mayor ship that she has to watch gradually causing the ship to sink with her on it.

The biggest part of all this, despite having close friends and others who might sympathize with her, ultimately, she has to face all this alone.

 

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