AD Sullivan journal 2013

    It’s a trap; but whose trap is it? At dinner with our former temporary boss, he confirmed he’s still in contact with our poet. Unfortunately, he thinks he’s clever and fed me information about his plans to work for R in the upcoming Hometown election. I might have believed it if only because of my suspicion that our poet is also working for R. But our former temporary boss rarely sounds convincing when he does things like this, making me think he’s still enraged about our poet being forced to resign last October, and would like to get me to compromise myself by feeding this phony bit of information to GA, the Hometown blogger. He has no poker face and so I can clearly see him biting back his rage over the last couple of weeks – just the way he looked a year ago when I threw him under the bus by telling our poet that we had met and talked about her (still one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.) I’m just not sure what he thinks I’ve done this time to deserve s...

    (this is the original analysis of her poem on jars -- somewhat mistaken because it missed an important element which was her cancer )   Is her current poem a response to a poem I posted? Unquestionably this complex poem continues the manipulation she started in a previous poem, but even though she seems to use the same metaphor I used in a poem I just posted, I still do not believe I am the subject of that manipulation. My poem made reference to a jar I keep on my desk at work, and I used the jar as a symbol of expectation and possibility. “I have to live with this empty jar on my desk, wishing I could fill it with anything other than pain, that ugly brew of putrid envy and my projected issues. The more you stir, the worse it gets, digging up detritus of my own confusion and outrageous falsehoods. You can’t stir dirty water and expect it to get clean. So, better this empty jar with my reflected face, filled with silence, and more what might have been, than...

    Highlighting the dangers of assuming her poetry somehow translate into everyday reality, my first attempt to analysis the poem she posted yesterday was a dismal failure. I’ll take a closer look at what I wrote to see if anything can be salvaged. Meanwhile, I’m writing this one up from scratch. In some ways, it is an unrequited love poem, similar to previous poems that bemoan her inability to be with someone she loves. More importantly, it is a poem about her struggle with cancer (alone without the apparent support of her lover), an aspect I missed when I first tried to analysis it. It is also a description of her self-treatment, another aspect of the poem I missed, a daily treatment that comes close to being a religious ritual, something she is doing in a desperate attempt to save her own life, perhaps having little or no confidence in traditional medicine. The description is almost clinical and manages to avoid the distasteful aspects of the treatment she mu...

    I touched upon this yesterday, and will likely explore it more in depth in the future because of all the odd things that have transpired in telling this tale over the last year or so, the fact that she and our former temporary boss came up with the same kind of cancer and announced this fact to the world over the same weekend is the oddest of all, increasing suspicion about how they have been connected, even though our temporary boss is doing everything possible to hush it up. This is a type of cancer that is contagious and is often transmitted through oral, something our former temporary boss fully admitted to, only claiming he contracted it at some point prior to his marriage. Since the cancer can lie dormant for decades in some cases, this gave him the needed to keep his marriage from imploding. It appears his diagnosis came about last month as he informed us and the world that he would need surgery to remove the growth from his throat. She made her announcement...

  I don’t know why I keep going back to poems I know are designed to tell me off, such as the one she posted a year ago last June, after some of the fireworks had started, yet prior to the real betrayal. So, the tone remains somewhat civil, yet also distant and cold. Writing about these poems a year later gives perspective I did not have when I wrote after her original posting, partly due to all the poems I’ve written about since, giving me a better (if still inadequate) idea of who she might be behind her masks, and what she wants. Perhaps by going back, I might hope to pick up on clues my confusion back then made me overlook, some error in direction that kept me from halting the sadness which came about later. I think back then – and to some degree presently – I saw what I wanted to see, making judgements based on my interpretation of the life (shell or mask) behind which she hid. Posted on June 6, 2012, her poem was the first in a series of poems directed at me, a ki...

      I took a stroll around a section of Passaic I hadn’t walked in since I lived on Paulson Avenue in the mid-1970s when my best friend and I used my apartment to write and record songs we hoped would make us famous and never did. His death three years ago has left a hole in my life I can’t fill, even though I continue to record. The walk stirred up those old memories, and then oddly, I stumbled onto a sign advertising the summer in the park concert series, only to discover that the band my poet played with for five years is scheduled to appear next Thursday, an odd bit of synchronicity since I have been typing in old journal entries from a decade ago, only to realize that there are still unresolved questions about that time in her life when she worked for the band– as to what she said to me, and what is implied in one particular poem she posted about that period in her life  -- this regarding the small old woman who gobbled up boys and girls, and who went ...

    The silence is astounding. So is the lack of traffic on my blog. I’m supposed to meet with our former temporary boss shortly. While I feel sorry for him, I don’t trust him. I think he’s still brimming with rage at me for our poet resigning from our office and may possibly believe I’m responsible for it. But our poet seems determined to keep her job at up county town hall, even if the Virgin Mayor is forced to resign by losing his court case. The office gossip told me the Virgin Mayor arranged Civil Service protection for our poet – something I already knew from the paperwork she filed with the state last month. She may simply be bidding her time, clinging to the job there until R is elected in Hometown where she can get possibly a better position. The distance isn’t much greater from where she lives to Hometown townhall than it is to the townhall she goes now. Rumor has it she may have talked our former Temporary Boss into taking a job with the R admini...

The NSA scandal has nothing on what is going on in our office these days – especially if you believe half of what GA’s blog posts, she claims is going on with us. Even our owner has gotten in on internet spying, as he installs more tracking devices to keep track of who is hitting our website, and whether or not – as pointed out from last year – some of the staff might be spiking their own numbers to make themselves look good in his eyes. Someone talked him into upgrading the company warehouse, telling him he ought to post more pictures and videos. And so, as cheap a son of a bitch as he is, he’s invested in a new webpage design, and started asking us to do more picture stories. This may or may not have anything to do with the issue earlier this year when she talked some union guys on a project in my town to allow her to do a photo shoot, one that the boss wanted me to duplicate, but I could not, unable to seduce the local workers into letting me onto the site the way she appare...

    I can’t get passed the idea that she yanked down the poem again. It means something, although I’m not sure quite what. As with Circa 2003 poem, she may have said something too openly, and felt uncomfortably exposed, a raw nerve standing out for anybody to see. I couldn’t help mentioning my issues with her to a former writer for our paper, who had been fired nine months before she came to our office, and so had no knowledge of her, but a fresh set of ears that – unlike our former temporary boss – had no personal agenda to worry about. This reporter showed up out of the blue to “talk” to me, and I pretty much laid out the whole picture for him – including mentioning that poem. As with several other former writers for our office, the R campaign had approached him. He said he declined the job and did not go into the details. Maybe the two incidents are unrelated, and since this reporter has no love for our owners, he would not likely be carrying tales back to...

    One of the most persistent themes in the poetry she has posted over the last year or two deals with the concept of invisibility. In borrowed lives, she clearly says the person people see when dealing with her is not the real her. She is another entity hidden in each of the shells she adopts as her current personal and suggest that regardless of ho close a person might get to her, they are dealing with a mask behind which her real self resides. And as an invisible woman, she often operates on a plane we who are observing do not suspect. Something she referred to in a poem posted earlier this year, w3hen she painted herself as a collector of odd things, other people rarely see, things revealed and given away, by unsuspecting people who presume nobody is watching, when she always is. Being invisible and being able to detect signs in others is how she survives, always alter for what others reveal, be it positive or negative, she sees things in others they do not know...

      After re reading her poem about borrowed lives, I went back to a poem she posted in the heart of our conflict last June, even though there are other people the might be better in expressing similar themes. The poem she posted on June 1, 2012, however, seems to fit in with the idea of moving on, leaving the residue of her old life behind so she can continue to invent a new life. While I wrote about the poem after she posted it, a year’s study of her poetic works changes my previously cynical approach I had back then. In what might fall under the heading of “It’s more trouble than it’s worth,” her poem depicts her standing near the sea at night, breeze blowing through her hair, aware of that “it” is everywhere around her, around every corner. She can see it waiting, “harnessing all tis strength by taking what she didn’t know she gave.” The allusion suggests that this person or thing feeds off her like a leach, and if she does not get ride of it, she won’t survive -- a...

     Looking at those people who follow her on Twitter, you have to wonder if maybe she intends to make a grand return back to our office, sparking the dread I had last summer when I half believed she intended to eventually become my boss. Not merely, who follows her, but who she follows as well – the owner, our boss, even our office website. She would be crazy to come back, since the owner isn’t going to give her the kind of money she deserves. The fact that she is following our boss, who herself is in the midst of a nasty divorce, makes me wonder if perhaps she senses an opportunity, and might move up from her one-time role as cub to a new role in the corner office, near enough the owner and our former temporary boss to possibly make the trip back worth it after all – especially if she can attain the kind of money our boss makes. It is also difficult to figure out if she does better manipulating men than she does women and may well explain why our boss when she came bac...

    Her most recent poem stunned me in a different way that the one she posted two weeks ago, partly because she has exposed herself in an unexpected way – just the way the trickle up poem did, and less disguised in its openness than her poem about change of priorities in 2003. Not only does the current poem raise the question as to who she really is once you strip away all the masks she typically wears, but also why she decided to reveal herself now, and to whom she is really revealing herself in this poem. The tone and subtext suggest that she is once more moving on, stepping out from one avatar and preparing to adopt a new face, although in the past she mostly did this when something dramatic occurred, the failed restaurant in New York, or the fire that gutted her apartment upstate, affairs falling to pieces and her need to pursue some new career from dancer to horse trainer. Yet from the exterior, nothing of the sorts seems to have occurred in her life just now i...

    Two weeks after posting an extremely manipulative poem about how great sex with some man or maybe a woman was, she steps back out of her protective cover once again, reviving the pattern of her life in a brilliant but complex poem about how people really don't see who she actually is, but rather the life she happens to be living at the moment. Unlike her Windows poem that she posted last summer she says she has no home – a theme she has previously touched on, suggesting that everything is temporary even the projected image of who people think she is. Life is never what it seems and though people believe they have a grasp on who she is or what she wants, she as well as life constantly changes identity, largely because she often adopts a different persona to meet her needs “I've never felt at home because I've never been at home,” she says. She survives by clothing herself in what she calls “borrowed lives”, lives that are not really who she is but rather a shel...