Dixon's Forum Posts from Dixon

I won’t say his name; I feel I should protect his identity.   He never asked me to, though.   For some reason, I like to keep quiet when someone might be embarrassed or something, like I’m holding a secret — even when they don’t ask, I don’t tell.   It’s just my way.

That way might be a gift, or a curse, depending on how the world views it.   Maybe, I don’t even want it, and don’t even know I can lose it.

Throughout everybody’s upbringings, all their ways, inborn and instilled, get impacted by interacting powerful outside forces — parents-or-guardians, caretakers, schools, communities — forces that may or not handle them with care, forces whose mission is guide healthy growth in functional ways and worldly-wisdom.   But some only boss and control, or ill-use, or unwittingly mar, or fail to protect, or bail out, or with all good intentions just blow it, so some minds wind up clueless, confused, some are twisted, or warped.

Ways can evolve, or decay, they can crystallize.   Under certain conditions, humans can grow from cradle to grave and never know their ways are not immutable.

Sometimes, a personality gets frozen in motion by shock or trauma, chronic maltreatment or manipulation, seized in a vortex of fear and rage, grief and despair; pursuit of happiness ended for the flight from the pain, or consumed by the lust for a just revenge.

And some minds just get lost, and can’t find their way.

And, crippled by self-doubt and shame, some people spin out into endless spirals of defeatist thinking perpetuated in pessimistic self-fulfilling prophecies, spawning feelings like inadequacy and suspicion, persecution and resentment that warp their worldview, cloud their judgment, stifle their sociability, and imprison their intellect.

Driven by powerful emotions, seemingly bright, functional people make monumentally misguided, disastrous decisions — like self-sabotage, and throwing away golden opportunities, and self-sacrifice, like throwing them own selves right under the bus — ever confident they’re doing the best, the rightest, the most deserving, of all things.

They stumble and grumble, as hopes and dreams crumble, blunder and wonder why life keeps them under, in a never-ending cycle — subconsciously inviting rejection and failure, baffled when nothing, love nor money, ever, works out, outcomes compounding their most critical self-imagery, hopelessly lost, conditioned and resigned to life under unfriendly outside control.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.   Nobody in their right mind invites nor welcomes these prisonish mental hells, that visit down upon them from the outside, ordinarily during childhood, and then they are not in their right mind, perhaps forevermore, unless they ever find a way out, out from the spirals and endless cycles, from the anguish, the raging desolation — with no escape imaginable, no imaginable even existence of an escape.

So, if they cannot imagine it, then does it not exist?   A pathway off the vortices, and away from the powerless paralysis, and wounds of self-infliction . . . outward, toward confidence and strength, improvement and growth, satisfaction and fulfillment — and hiding right in plain sight the whole time.   . . .   But, that’s another story.

He seemed cautious, reserved, even, wooden, this hopeful candidate.    I like that in a politician — a thinker, not a schmoozer.

Public radio commentary would soon label him a “policy wonk”, lawmaking’s counterpart of “computer wizard”, or, “financial wonder”.    It takes a special kind of voters to truly appreciate such a candidate.   . . .

Strengthening the schools was his main platform plank, which had let me believe him more caring towards children, and I still say he was, even since getting <ahem> ✌🏻“educated”✌🏻 not everyone working for the schools 🦶🏻 actually is.  . . .    But, that’s another story.

My most powerful piece of the evening, “Paid-for Views”, was about how our politics colors our views, upon which we then base our votes, in fractious feedback loops, that barely consider the children, who commonly pay for our choices, sometimes with their very lives and how we might 🦶🏻 turn things to save and protect them instead.

It’s built upon a framework I called “Bl’imerick” (that’s B – l – apostrophe – imerick), when I first stumbled upon it trying to demonstrate how new word usages grow the language, like the noun “parent” suddenly blooming into also a verb, ✌🏻“parenting”✌🏻, way last mid-century, and questioning why the noun “poet” has yet to likewise blossom, even amidst the most ✌🏻“poeting”✌🏻 everywhere ever.

My Limerick ran out of room, so the ending-line bloomed to a couplet, and thusly emerged the Blossomed Limerick, pleasing me even more by also ballooning my poetry patterns palette.

The resulting “Bl’imerick on Bl’anguage” became a puzzle piece, posing hidden questions to be divined by decoding the contractions and blossoming adjective, with the solutions hiding in plain sight the whole time.  It’s kind o’ fun, like punny, but, can never be inherently funny, like a Limerick, due to differing scheming.

The Limerick rhythm-and-rhyme scheme sets up tension between mismatching couplets, which it then quickly dissolves by matching a single line to the dominating couplet.  Relief itself often stimulates laughter, like after a fright or crisis, as well as the feeling of quick relief from the Limerick’s structural tension, through channels beyond the words, that also channel our emotional responses to instrumental music.

The words speak to our intellect; the feelings they stir are driven by the thoughts they evoke, and colored by our views.

The rhythms tap out emotions primevally, in harmony or not with the words, whose very rhyming is itself yet another dimension of rhythm.

Working these various modes in concert, every poetic scheme yields its own particular style of this subliminal power, evokable by anyone.

The Bl’imerick scheme has a couple matching couplets sandwiching a mismatched couplet in-between.    Its tensions mount, then ebb, then stick, like this:

<ahem>

See?  Not funny at all.

“Paid-for Views” is several connected Bl’imerick stanzas, with wordage and syllables fitted on tight, the rhythm and rhyme scheme is 🤜🏻 balanced just right <“”>, conducting a purposeful flow that sweeps the ideas straight into your head . . . in theory.

There’s some pretty stirring scheming going on in the Love Poems, too.    . . .    But, that’s another story.