Words are what I have ...

How do people communicate? Not well. That is proven a thousand times a day. Words gone awry, misunderstood. Worse yet, misused, aimed like cudgels or knives depending on the skill of the one who wields them.

I write. Words please me, tease me, dance around the corners of my mind in dark or shining pictures of what is or might be real. Sometimes I write well, sometimes less so. I always start with a blank page and dive right in and let the movement of ideas and words take me where it will. Unplanned. Informal. Without structure.

Yet there is always thought behind the words. All the thoughts and observations, details I have seen and noticed, feelings felt, songs sung, pictures seen, all of this informs the way the words sprawl and spread and then arrange themselves.

While I acknowledge all emails, a letter that comments on the details of my profile will merit more attention than one that says interesting profile, tell me about yourself. If I reach out to say hello I will compare and contrast my experience with yours. Where might we have room for conversation to grow? A dialogue develop, making a connection rich and fun and worth persuing?

I thought of leaving yesterday. Deleting all my blog, making sure I have copies of the poems I post in the forums as I usually write my morning and evening greeting there and some of them are good. So many choose to use words as stones to pierce and wound, perhaps if we were standing there before them they would use fists and sticks as well. Harmless words are twisted into insults, and insults are escalated into battles royal until heads and profiles roll and threads are locked or deleted.

I believe in freedom of speech right up to the point where the speaker starts to say that others have no rights and should not be allowed to speak. And therein lies the problem. If you should say that I should die and others, fired and stirred by your polemic, follow through and kill me...well I am certainly at a disadvantage!

How do we find a balance? I used to be adept in debates, able to turn fallacious logic on an end and break the spines of arguments like sticks until one day my opponent lost his temper and broke my nose. It has never been quite the same since and I, for the most part, will now refrain from the fine art of structured discussion and argument unless I know you well.

Language is eroding, becoming single letters in a time-starved world and reading is a skill no longer taught as a matter of course it seems. The newspapers here are travesties of poor grammar and ill-written pap in a land that once could claim 98% literacy. But I still write for personal and public consumption. If brickbats come, I'll hope to catch them.