AD Sullivan journal 2013

   When you think a situation can’t get any more confusing, I ran into “A” at the annual journalism awards dinner where she tried to spin me in favor of “R,” the old guard candidate running for mayor in Hometown. “A,” who covered Hometown before “D” took over her beat, is rumored to be our poet’s barhopping buddy (this according to Hometown blogger GA), and so I got suspicious, wondering if this was some kind of scam. “A” had texted me out of the blue earlier in the day, asking me to give her a job reference, something else that seemed suspicious – although I shrugged it off, knowing she most likely couldn’t get a reference from our former Temporary Boss, who didn’t like her, or our regular boss, who liked her even less. Yet, knowing how close she was to our poet friend, the whole thing struck me as too similar to events a year earlier when our poet friend first texted me in the middle of the night. My BS radar went into overdrive when she sat down at our table at ...

  A big part of her status as a political insider may have been tested last night with a fundraiser for the congressman she and RR tried to overthrow, but whom the Virgin Mayor is once against courting as a political ally. Since she is the self-declared confidential secretary to the Virgin Mayor, you would think she would have to make an appearance as well – since the Virgin Mayor was rumored to attend. She would most definitely be at his side if her position is an important as she makes it out to be. Half the reason, I went was to see if the Virgin Mayor showed up at all, and to see if she had gall enough to walk into the lion’s den after all she tried to do to bring the congressman down while working at our office. I suspected she might not make an appearance even if the virgin mayor did, partly because down deep she hasn’t that kind of courage. She tends to boast a lot – especially to the office gossips, and exaggerates things on her Facebook page when in the safer com...

    Not to beat a dead horse, but the trickle up poem deserves as much attention as the fair/unfair poem, partly because both poems say largely the same thing. Life is unfair, and playing by rules is pointless because nobody else is. Trickle up, however, suggests that she once believed differently, and assumed that the illusion of a trickle-down society (as proposed by President Reagan in the 1980s) actually worked. If you have talent, work hard enough, you will by your merit achieve – something she completely abandoned in her fair-unfair poem and goes even further in this poem. She is saying that what she expected didn’t happen and she wound up as something else. She must accept what she has become and use what talents she has (in every sense of the word) to force herself upstream, Salmon-like, alluding with her dividing the word unadulterated into un ADULT- erated to suggest no moral ambiguity. This is what she is, see? So, accept it. The speaker of the poem is...

    I wanted to get off the subject of her fair/not fair poem, only to get redirected to a poem she posted last summer, took down, then briefly reposted this week – at least, I’m assuming it is the same poem since I only have a screen shot of the poem, and it no longer appears on her blog from back then. Maybe not so oddly, she only posted in on her blog this time, and not – as she is want do to – on her Facebook page as well –which suggests she may yank the poem down again shortly. I’ve made references to it as one of the most enlightening of her poems, something that suggested she is conscious of what she does and supports the conclusions of her poem about fair and unfair. In other words, you don’t get anywhere in this world by playing under somebody else’s rules, and as with the fair/unfair poem, she makes clear that life is not a game of fair or unfair, good or bad, right or wrong, only about getting what you want or need by whatever means you have at your disposal...

  One last observation about her fairness poem before I move on to catch up with all the poems she has posted since. Early on, when I first evaluated the poem, I skirted over the idea of wantonness. While she demonstrated her propensity towards wantonness while I was with her early on last year, her definition might not be completely accurate, despite my shock at some of her statements. “I like to get my share of dick,” she said when I asked at one point if she was bi-sexual, and she said she was. More than half our texting alluded to sex. In one case, she asked me to take a picture of my penis. In another incident, she texted me via phone at work and asked me to go to the men’s room and masturbate.   And I recall just how startled I was when she went out after having drinks with me to pick up some guy in a local bar to have sex with. “Don’t confuse working things out sex with love,” she told me. In her retro poem about changing priorities, she admitted she h...

    I keep coming back to the fairness poem because I still need to the answer to the most fundamental question about her, and hope that because this poem is so upfront, it might provide the answer as to whether she has operated over the last year as a free agent, doing her own bidding, or on behalf of one or more of the people she currently considers her friends. If the poem answers this, I can’t find it, but it does suggest that she lives her life doing as she pleases, and then agonizes over it afterwards. In other words, was she merely trickling up as she usually does, or operating on behalf of others such as RR. This poem doesn’t quite answer that question for me. But I suspect she would like to become as ruthless as the players she associates with, yet despite her claims otherwise, struggles with conscience, and the poem seems to be looking for an excuse to rid herself of this internal nagging so that she can get on with her life. As I’ve said previously, it i...

    I’m sure I’ll keep returning to this poem, just as I have the trickle up poem and the change of priorities poems because they lay it all out, as painful as it might be for me to read. Why painful? Why should I care what someone does with their own life or why they decide to live by their own rules? Good questions I can’t really answer, except in that I have invested more than a year of my life trying to make sense of this storm that swept through and can only marginally say I know more today than I did when the first clouds appeared on the horizon. The poem goes so much against the grain when it comes to my sense of morality that I struggle to get through it, even though ultimately, she is right – right and wrong count for nothing, and fair and unfair bind you from getting what you so desperately want – or in this case, what she thinks she deserves. The poem is a rebellion against those judgements people like me make about her, and in that regard, it is almost as...

    Only now, do I realize that I analyzed this poem out of order – after having been sidetracked by other poems that I went back to instead of taking everything as she posted them. And this poem of liberation I thought came at the end of April actually came at the end of May, explaining why it seemed so jarring to me after the love poems prior to it. Taking ii in context, I realize she had been building up to this poem, and how fair and unfair, good and bad no longer matter to her in the larger scheme of things. Apparently, I did take note of the poem when she posted it, scribbling things down in several places about my first impression, and how shocked I was about her views of what many might consider traditional morality, and how they are defined by words, and not by her concept of truth. Her obsession in her poetry over what is true is very much reflected in this poem. But truth is rarely what people make it out to be and certainly never objective, or as from on...

  To whom her next poem is written remains a mystery. Since there are no direct references to anything I’ve written, this could simply be a poem addressed to herself, although it actually appears to continue a discussion with someone over the nature of life, the other person calling a situation complicated, while she maintains it is simple – but with caveats. Since I can find no reference to any argument I made, I’m assuming this poem is to someone else, someone who also reads her poetry. Still the title implies a stealth relationship, similar to the “clever and illusive” bit she stuck at the end of one of her poems last fall, a fleeting glimpse of something in passing, rather than anything direct. Happiness, which lies on the edges of perception, does not last, and this secret it to enjoy those brief moments when it exists while they can. This may well be a reference to a relationship she is involved in, something separated from the main action of her life, yet still c...

  Since she posted this poem after I posted a picture of RR on my site, I have to wonder if she went into her current situation with her eyes shut tightly. I had perhaps mistakenly assumed that she had moved on from RR, and that the brilliant and moving love poems she posted a few months ago were meant for someone else. Now, I’m not so sure. The poem is clearly a reflection of something failing, some falling apart, hopes dashed like a ship against rocks. She assumed she could handle the situation and the people who operate in the shadows, perhaps even seeing herself as one of them, a clever and illusive player, who could hold her own in their company, when they have made a profession as confidence men, and may well have used her, but given her nothing in return for her loyalty. Again, all this is trying to figure out how a watch works without opening up the works, relying on clues left in poetry which often are too obtuse to give off anything accurate, not even the time...

        Fate or something akin to it brought me face to face with RR yesterday at the Memorial Day parade in Secaucus. He had set up a lounge chair on the sidewalk around Paterson Plank Road about a block up from the bridge over Route 3. I was hurrying to get to the head of the parade when I saw him. He looked exactly as he had in the photo from the Virgin Mayor’s fundraiser, just sadder, more isolated. She was not with him; he was there with his two kids, yet just as telling, neither was his wife, making me think of all those poems she’d posted, about suburban life, about the relationship that had fallen apart. Was this the man she was writing about the whole time? I had discounted it; but there in the middle of Secaucus I began to wonder if perhaps I was wrong in doing so. The wife’s absence said a lot about his marriage in the way he resembled a number of estranged husbands, many of whom stood along the same stretch of road, using the parade to bond wi...

    So, what happened to turn her anger in my direction again, if indeed I am the creator of the show as she claims someone is – or is there some new arch enemy that rivals me for her dubious affection. This new phase of the cold war comes after an intense and heated romance with some man, a romance that ultimately did not work out. I am tempted to think she needs to divert herself from those emotional wounds by resurrecting an old enemy she can focus her attentions on. And yet, something may have happened, some event that caused her to abruptly change course in her poetry, and turn her wrath back on me, perhaps something I posted she interpreted wrongly (or rightly?), and which put me back on her periscope. The big question is what to do about it, if anything can be done. I cannot communicate with her, and even if I tried it would only make matters worse, reverting back to that situation of her birthday disaster, or any other attempt I’ve made to apologize, whether ...

    Some of her poems are easy to interpret, or at least, can elicit an educated guess as to what they mean and to whom the poem is directed. This poem about the good fight is not one of those, loaded with ambiguous references that might easily lead to false assumptions, and I believe to some degree this is intentional, as she takes a step back from poems too easily interpreted which left her inner self too exposed. This poem also takes a giant step back from the intense emotional swings of some of her previous poems. It attempts to be more objective and rational like a mathematician trying to work out a calculation. There is no emotion in math or in logic, and this might be labeled a logical poem in that regard. In some ways, this poem reflects the theme she posed in her earlier poem on fair and unfair in that what we say are just words. In this case, the word is “defeated”, suggesting a negative outcome to a conflict she has been having with someone she seems to ha...

    Although I did not intend to revisit any more of her pervious poems, I felt the need to examine her good fight poem at least once more before I moved on, since it seems to be directed in my direction – although I might be wrong. At least, it made me cringe in a similar way as her poems did last summer, making me feel as if I am a bug under a magnifying glass with the heat of the sun focused directly on me – although at times during last summer, she seemed to think she went too far and posted poems of pity such as quick sand and compassion. There is some of that in this poem, as if she is taking a half step back from her previous total outrage, becoming more reflective. This is not to say that she is any less angry from the poem in which she accused me of playing games, and in which she refused to fall for the seductions of my smooth words, and this poem seems to reflect that distrust of my poetry as the earlier poem did, and makes the distinction between what she b...

  I’m totally screwed up when trying to keep up with her most recent poems, partly because I keep going back and reassessing poems, I’ve already assumed I knew the meaning of. But I suspect I have caught up now and can get onto her most recent posting, trying to avoid the misconceptions that sent me scrambling back to reexamine poems she posted previously. I got lulled into believing that some of the poems she posted were about her failed romance, missing the sudden change of tone and the possible nasty redirection of some at me. Even her poem of liberation may well be her shedding any guilt and telling her critics (and she sees me as this I suppose) to not judge her. The scribe poem came out of the blue since there seemed to be no inspiration for it, nothing done on my part to cause her to post it as a reaction. The show poem she recently posted is another one – at least in part – aimed at me, and again it is difficult for me to figure out what inspired it. She can’t p...