AD Sullivan journal 2013

        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...

      Our former temporary boss got through surgery okay, his wife told me via email, I resisted the urge to have her call our poet to let her know the good news, since our poet would no doubt be worried as well, though I don’t know exactly what the relationship is, and perhaps such a thing might be better left in the hand of D, our hometown reporter, since he seems as attracted to our poet as our former temporary boss is. I think both of them managed to avoid my fatal flaw, realizing they will never have exclusive rights to our poet and will settle for some fun early on, and then life in the back seat watching someone else drive. But I also suspect those attached to her will go along with whatever she wants, just to keep in good graces, even if they suspect she might be manipulating them. Some questions still remain such as the role James, the political operative, plays in his relationship with us, and the third ticket, and A, who will become the PR person for the third ...

  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 ...

  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...

    When the Hometown democratic chairman called the Congressman’s press officer from the bar to say he was having drinks with our poet, the PR person – who sees our poet as a black widow – freaked out and sent two of her thugs to rescue him. This is the first solid evidence that seems to indicate our poet is working for candidate R. The Democratic chairman is one of the hold outs R needs if he has any hope of winning a seat as mayor. Just who sent her to allegedly seduce the democratic chairman, although it is clear already that she and A are hooked up with Carmelo in the Hometown housing authority, but perhaps more importantly, they also have contact with Joe, the owner of a sex club on Washington Street, who apparently keeps a stable of women available for his clients – not to say that A or our poet serves him in that capacity. Joe has a long and notorious history in Hometown and New York City. He owns several clubs in Hometown, one of which was previously own...

    You only get so many warnings before the roof falls in. Our owner has had his “talk” with me. So has his partner, and so has our former temporary boss.   There is no way of knowing if this has anything to do with our poet or her position in the Hometown election. But I suspect, our former temporary boss still holds my actions from a year ago against me and would like nothing better than to see me exposed and fired (perhaps on the mistaken belief our poet might return if I’m no longer here, and he can get back to the mentor/cub life they had lived prior to my actions after our meeting in the park. He gave me false information he hopes I will pass on to GA, the hometown blogger, and this will serve as the final straw with the owner, who may also be looking to build his case against me (possibly for the same reason as our former temporary boss). Meanwhile, I’m still puzzled over our poet’s yanking down her most provocative poem, and has not posted anything in n...

    since I keep asking about what role she intends to play, and the answer may well be contained in a poem that she posted in early June which I wrote about yet not in the context of political power when I first read it, I believed she spoke about love saga she seems to have been involved in since the beginning of the year in some ways even in a role as a private secretary to the virgin mayor she seems to have dropped out of sight I assume that because her boss has taken up PR for the R campaign in hometown she would move on with him this may not be the case and word on the street is that a who formerly covered hometown for us may be getting a big role in that campaign although it seems as an undercover agent not to steal the strategies the way our poet did in her town but as an active saboteur looking to destroy ours challenger from within and if rumor is right she will get a hefty salary for the privilege since a and our poet are rumored to be bar hopping pals thi...

    Tim, our former Hometown writer from a long time ago, confirmed that he’s been seeking current and former writers from our office to help with R’s campaign for mayor. The problem is this seems so much like what our poet tried to do last summer, using our office as a political weapon, so, I wonder if the same devious mind concocted that plot last summer as the one Tim is proposing today. Tim has become an operative for the Democratic Party whose leadership on the state level would love to see R defeat the current progressive mayor, and he’s coming seems to be part of that effort. I can’t say if our poet is involved in this plot to take over our office; whether she gave the idea to Tim, but even our former temporary boss has spoken to Tim, and it is from this conversation that he hatched the plot to see if I am source to GA, the hometown blogger. But when I asked Tim if he had offered our former temporary boss a job in the R campaign, he said, no, directly contradi...

    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...