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(The poet thanks historian Zambrotta of Italy for printing for compilation all posts and correspondences concerning this targeted victimization)

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Recorded Reading: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r21ird8ih76ioks/2023_07_29_21_40_37.mp3?dl=0

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Toughening Up

Poets, you know, want to love everybody. And they want to tell the truth. Beyond that, they hope their work brings clarity, upliftment, healing and motivation. At least, this poet does.

Did.

When one maintains oneself in such a state of sensitivity, any unkindness is a heartbreak. Calculated unkindness on a twenty four hour basis is an unsupportable reality.

Even those who have been kind seem to hold themselves ready to shift allegiance at the drop of a word.

This poet received deliberate unkindness from a Target employee very recently who, of all the employees of that store, should know better. Should know what unreasoning hatred does. Should want to know the other side of that story.

But that employee didn’t sit right behind the household he or she is so prissily defending for thirty days, daring not even to get out of her van and go indoors since she was already experiencing everything from false accusation to being used as a shield when the guns came out, after the individual named knowingly let the thieves into that house.

Right?

Okay.

It’s clear that while the poet’s targeter is, for the moment, too careful to operate with birdcalls (it’s been suddenly, miraculously and completely silent on 24th Street this last couple of days), he’s not gone.

Neither are the recruits he brings by, squeaking, honking, yelling and sometimes throwing things.

He’s even found ways to keep the poet awake all night without disturbing people sleeping very nearby. 

The poet can now move a little further away ~ to a distance in which it is hoped she will at least be heard if she has to scream.

No screeching birds, and a further off poet. Big relief to everybody on the block. Great.

… And what is it that the suddenly unfriendly counter people; the police who assure me with straight faces that the law says other than it does; the mouth breathers who spend their time making sure this poet’s thoroughly miserable and not just partially so; the “ladies” who don’t care if a sister ends up looking like the one hundred tortured animals which have been left for her, as long as she doesn’t presume to exist in their line of site; the targeter himself; even the poet’s own pathetic Nazi white trash family ~ what is it that they all want?

They want the poet to shut up. 

They don’t want beautiful music. Happy poetry.

They don’t want silence, either, of course.

They want the sounds of revving engines. Honking Horns. Tortured dogs. 

Backbiting.

Gunshots.

Then something’s considered to be really happening here. Not just some homeless woman getting scientifically driven crazy.

Okay, well, the poet fought, harder than hard, to keep a little bastion of beauty alive in this world.

She said she’d do that till she needed the energy simply to keep from weeping in public, and to concentrate on driving responsibly.

That time came days ago.

A bastion of beauty is not wanted here.

What’s wanted is for her to shut up and “toughen up.”

… And she’s finding, when she isn’t dedicating every speck of spare energy to service to her society, that it’s much easier to field the thousand idiocies this targeter spends all day and night devising. Much easier to shrug it off. Much easier to say, “It’s just a fucking fool…

“World’s full of them.”

This poet has received endless trouble in life from having been overheard by the wrong person to say that our homeless people simply disappear all the time ~ the community is so used to it they don’t even ask what happened any more, they just absorb the loss by habit and move on ~ and that it is good to have someone reliable on the street to point out which ones should and shouldn’t be going that way.

A reliable street source isn’t wanted either.

Much rather spend untold manpower and money squeezing it out of some pressured snitch who’s despised and can’t really be trusted anyway.

So. If this poet disappears, her story is already printed for publication in case electronic access becomes denied.

At least, this time, someone will know what happened:

A poet has been transformed, by much time and unbelievable amounts of hidden pressure, into a useless parasite.

That’s what seems to be wanted, after all.

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