Will it ever end Aimee Mann June 22, 2013

July 28, 2023

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 imply.

When does it all stop? When does she wise up?

She says she has no answers, and thinks “the wiser I get, the worse I fair.”

She keeps getting into he lives of strangers, meeting them at a time when they seem to be in the midst of crisis.

“A fall apart cross roads, as they crash into her, and when they realize what they’ve done, they pick up and run.”

Did she say too much or not enough? Did she chase them away?

On the other hand, are those who “cling.”

Hard.

She runs from them.

So, regardless, someone is always out of breath and not in a good way. She obviously prefers getting out of breath making love.

What she wants is to bump into someone who is in the same place as she is, where she can stand up straight and get some momentary rest from the drama before she must plunge back into the real world again.

She apparently had seen enough of this pattern to become sick of it, needing for all of it to “quiet down” - that hamster wheel in her brain “full of its own endless banter and chewed up distortions” of everything that had ever been said to her throughout her life.

She calls this a state of peace, “liquid quiet” in which her heart doesn’t palpitate out of her chest so hard she needs to meditate just to keep from shaking.

But she said she can’t find peace even in meditation, full of desperation.

“I wish I could begin my days with a sense of normalcy,” rather than having “to claw and spit up to a place” where she can function without falling on the floor.

Such panic apparently routinely ruins here attempts to even put on eye liner.

All this months before what eventually transpired between us, something of a foreshadowing of what was to come.

At this point, she makes reference to the ironic nature of her job at our office “creating and writing other people’s life,” which makes up her life, but not really her own life, a strange “metal life” that is both a privilege and a source of complete exhaustion.

But she ends the poem on a positive not that she hasn’t yet given up hope.

The enlightening thing revealed in this poem is the fact that she appears not to be seeking love, but rather a tolerable companionship, someone she can be with who is on a similar level of emotional stability, where she can get out of breath in a good way, and still get peace and quiet, inside and out.

She desires to be with someone she can co-habit with, lacking the turmoil that scares potential candidates away or has them clutching at her like needy children.

This poem comes just prior to the one-eyed jack poem, a revelation I largely missed, and so did not realize what she had hoped to achieve when she reached out to me, “don’t try to save me,” being the operative words, and suggesting she did not wish to change who she is, but rather merely seeking someone who is neither scared of her or so utterly infatuated as to smother her.

I’ll return to this poem in the future to look more closely at how it is reflected in her later poems.