AD Sullivan journal 2013

    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 ...