AD Sullivan journal 2013

  As said earlier, the poem she posted on October 4, 2012 about leaving our office, comes almost exactly one year after her posting a poem about her high hopes when first hired. Even when I first read this poem – telling me before anybody in the office did that she had resigned – I saw all the flaws in logic in contained, and how she took blame for things that just weren’t hers to take blame for. Or maybe, rather, thinking that she failed herself, even as she was being pressured into resigning by – what I later learned – was the Small Man. Although oddly, she attributed this to “they,” suggesting others may have been involved in that fateful confrontation. The man who exposed her relationship with RR was a political operative from elsewhere in the county, who had worked on the campaign for the man the Virgin Mayor defeated, but someone who had been tied to RR in a much earlier congressional campaign in Perth Amboy, and to whom RR had promised to give the political dirt on...

  A poem she posted just about the time she started working at our office reflect many of the themes she would expand upon over the next year and a half: starting over and getting what she thinks she deserves. After more than a year of unemployment, failed opportunities and a spoiled romance, she is looking for a chance to hear “the wounds and worries of past dismay.” Then, from then on, she engaged a new face of “confidence and reticence” and by adopting this new face she can somehow get the “charge required” in order to start over and actually see it through to an acceptable conclusion: “This time.” Almost to the day a year later, she would post a poem about not having what it takes to see this current thing through, somewhat ironic bookend to her employment at our office, and how she ended up where she started, an oft repeated pattern of behavior she engaged in long prior to her coming with us. In her poem in October 2011, she hoped her new start would lead to “lasting...

    Going back to poetry written before I came on her radar provides clues to how she thinks and foreshadows a bit of what came later after we came together. A whole month prior to that fateful text in the middle of the night she posted a poem that laid out much of what her life was about to that point. The opening line to the poem posted on the 20th in February 2012 makes reference to Amy Mann a well-established alternative rock performer who a critic once claimed explores depressing themes while transcending the self-pity so associated with love sick laments, an artist that writes about underdogs, misfits, loves lost and outsiders. Mann is best known for writing songs about dark subjects though often humorous as well and full of sarcasm. the fact that she our poet is reaching out to Mann in this poem suggests that there is some kind of connection and highlights her own questioning of romance, suggesting that such things are not the happy affairs most love songs i...

        I wrote about this poem about a year ago when she first posted in in May 2012, and I’m most certain it is the second people she wrote about our temporary boss, and further shows how she trickled up from me to him, and in this is a more direct suggest that their relationship went beyond celibate friendship, although not yet definitive proof. As pointed out in my previous observation, he appears to be curled up beside her in bed, a reassuring presents she claims as a blue ribbon, and whose voice she was uncertain about when he first became boss. She had asked me about him, questioned how roughly he had treated her, as if he needed to put her in his place, a cub, while he played boss. “What does it mean?” she asked me. “Why is he singling me out?” His tough boss attitude might well have been a cover for his attract to her, something I believe she fully understood even when she asked me about it. The voice of reprimands she first encounter, yet she sa...

  She posted her first poem about our temporary boss in early May 2012, one more sign of her moving on, a sign I missed just ahead of my birthday, when I had assumed all was still relatively well between us. She had already shared a number of stories with him partly based on her research into his background and the book he had recently published she knew he had this thing for needy girls and found the topic of the mob in New Jersey fascinating he had had dealings with the mob and his youth her past played into both of these things as well as his need to serve as a mentor to some young writer he took very seriously her fear of her stalker from Brooklyn and took charge in making sure she was protected if something happened asking the receptionist in our office to put a photo of the man on our company server the first clue about her interest in him came when I got to her apartment and found his book on her bed instead of mine a book that provided more insight into him than...

  Although I should know better, I can’t help; think she may have responded to a cover tune I posted, since her poem uses some of the same language as the song did; or possibly pure coincidence. “Every day, my mind is all around you, looking out from my lonely room, day after day,” the song goes. “I remember holding you while you sleep. “I breathe deeply, and I feel you all around me…and hear you as I fall asleep.” Lingering a bit on this poem, she seems to be reflecting on some peaceful moment – “They’ve calmed, the throes of wanting as this thing has levelled out.” Again, we get possible double meaning – “throes of wanting,” could be her wonton self or her trickle up aspirations,” which leave her into a bit of the unknown, or a plane of its own. This desire, of course, is always there, in what she calls “the Floaty space” between head and heart.” And then makes a reference that seems odd, talking about “the other two” that transverse the realer planes of existence...

    In re-reading my poetry journal recently, I was alarmed to find that the competition between me and her at the office began a lot sooner than I originally thought – as early as mid-April 2012 when the space shuttle arrived in the area to become part of the air and space museum in Manhattan. She took an amazing photo from some point along the Hudson River waterfront, a shot to be proud of – only to get outdone by an accidental shot I took when the shuttle on the back of airliner – flew over a local bridge, making it look it was part of rush hour traffic. After more than a year and all that has happened since, it is difficult to know if she took offense, or if she even considered it a competition, friendly or not. Later on, the competition became obvious – at least to me, in regard to hits on the company website her stories achieved each week. At some point, I started to notice how many of her stories became the top viewed stories, and I began to suspect they wer...

      Looking back over the last year. I realized I have not written so much about one person since my best friend died and I began to put together a history of his life. To write about someone extensively. I have to be inspired by that person on some level. I don't even write a lot about those women I claim to have loved and the bulk of what I have written has been primarily about three women in my life my ex-wife and my childhood sweetheart Peggy the stripper and now this poet. Because my ex-wife was my first serious love and me because we experienced so much together during our time as a couple I have written massively about her in poetry. Journals. short stories and novels -- maybe 15 novels all totaled and well more than 100 short stories even a few songs. Peggy. the stripper. dominated my journal for a while -- much of which went into creating two novels. some poetry and a number of songs because she was so much into my performing for her. After a year...

      A year has passed since the most dramatic events of 2012, one of which was a trip I took to Woodstock and what I posted on my blog when I got back. The tension a year ago was also tied to my posting of a photo she sent me when she was perched on her roof top. Both photos so enraged her she even called me demanding I remove them. The roof top photo has an interesting history because she actually sent it to my phone weeks, maybe even a month, prior to that night she took to the roof top after I stupidly left her at the bar in Hometown. Like the photo she sent me with her “friends,” the roof top photo was too dark for me to make out until I downloaded it later and lightened it, startled to find her face and the five floor drop to the street behind her. I had forgotten all about the photo until the day after she freaked out over the bar incident and added it to a poem I posted urging her not to consider leaping off the roof. She went ape shit and demande...

    Another poem of hers I did not play close enough attention to from back in late April 2012. It is a poem that suggest growing distance between me and her, thought it is not blatantly a poem written to or about me. Again, she posted the poem at a time when she was already transitioning from me to our Temporary boss and perhaps to the owner as well. The poem makes clear how she feels about traditional romance. This should have served me warning since the poem came two weeks prior to my birthday celebration in the Hometown bar when I tired to give her a card and some candy (which she later said, “I don’t eat.”) The poem makes it clear how she needs to remain independent, a theme she sticks to in many later poems, especially the one in which she referred to the pause she took when her lover wanted to develop a relationship of “we” and she could not let go of “I.” In her poem, she mentions “false cries of chivalry” and the promises often articulated, and makes cle...

  Just when you would least expect it, her latest posted poem returns to the love story she started last January, although clearly a longing for what once was, and most likely won’t be again – or maybe, something infrequent. Like many of her poems, this one appears to be an effort to explain her situation to someone for whom she has sincere affection, and from whom she hopes to gain acceptance again. Whether this is the same person she wrote previous poems to, it’s hard to say, although she is clearly trying to sway him. (In my self-deception, I wanted to believe this is a response to a song I posted, but it is not). But the poem does reflect her current mindset, a kind of forlorn wish that things were different than they turned out. Things have calmed, she says, the “Those of wanting” this thing have some how leveled out, moving onto a mothering undefinable plain. And yet it always there, “the floaty space between head and heart,” while other things “traverse the rea...

    As pointed out in a previous journal, I did not pay close attention to her poetry early on. Otherwise, I might have been more careful, and might have had a better understanding of what she is about, and her agenda. And if I am reading one of her early poems from late April 2012 correctly, she appears to have been warning me (and other people) about who she really is and what she is really after. She paints herself as a hummingbird (something of a musical connotation), who lands to get nourishment, then quickly moves on “Fast, long and hard” taking refuge with someone else. This landing, feeding and taking off again has become her reality. Nothing is permanent, or for that matter meant to be mean. This is simply who she is and what she does, and how she survives. She “flits” in and out of other people’s vision, and for a time, some are mesmerized by her, searching for some deeper meaning before she moves on from them. While those whose lives she touches wa...

      What makes me suspicious about her activity during and after her time working in our office are all the connections she made, who I would never have suspected, and which ties her to some of the most unscrupulous political operatives in the county – people who were political opponents of the Virgin Mayor and RR. This included a detective in the opposing Mayor (and state Senator) town, his public relations man, and the deputy chief of the fire department of that town, and a retired police captain and the retired deputy police chief as well. The PR guy from that town was notorious for his dirty politics and use of black mail behind the scenes, as well as his ties to the Private Detective seeking to bring down the Neighboring Mayor, one of the Virgin Mayor’s chief allies. She clearly made connections as the PR person for the Virgin Mayor, including some top editors in some of the daily newspapers in the area. Why is she so connected to some of the Virgin Mayor...