Putting two and two together May 2013

 


 

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 someone who was clearly naïve to once have had faith in the system as fair, but has learned better, and has become something other than what she might have foreseen, someone through a series of hard knocks learned to survive and perhaps thrive, meeting her needs with “an upsurge” and “frankly, un-ADULT – erated.”

The main question is just who she is speaking to. It has to be someone who has suspected the truth about her, someone judgmental (as indicated in the fair-unfair poem) and someone she feels the need to explain why she is the way she is.

Coming after fair/unfair, the scribe poem and several other bitter poems, I suspect this might be aimed at me. But it is possible, she is talking to someone else who has reached the same conclusions I have, and she needs to make it clear, she once believed merit and talent could bring her what she needs, but now, she knows better, and must embrace the world as it is, thus making however bitter the lemonade from the lemons life has given her.

The poem is full of resignation, less confessional or even defiant than the fair/unfair poem, although there is a sense of defiance in the subtext saying: “This is how I am, whether you like it or not.”

A brief, but brilliant poem, it is structured on two extremely short verses, the first of which said trickle down society has turned her into what she has become, even though it is not what she intended. The second verse says she has decided to meet fate head on, making the best of a bad situation, using what god given talents she has in a world dominated by powerful people.

Implied by not said in this poem is the fact that those she uses to get ahead are in their own right corrupt, and if they were so morally superior, they would not be vulnerable to her seductions.

A legitimate argument.

This is so blatantly honest, I understand why the poem made a brief appearance earlier, and I suspect, she will not keep it up on her blog long because someone else might be smart enough to put two and two together.

I don’t know why I should feel so sad reading this and the other poems. This is how life works, even if I’m not willing to admit or embrace it.

 


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