Once In a While Meltdown

[tectak]

You make very valid points- so much so that I have begun to feel my resolve weaken. However, let me make one more attempt to explain myself:

"When the squirrel heard a noise, it panicked into the underbrush."

I'm using 'lose her mind' as a descriptor for the way she exited the room. Can you give me an example of how you would reword that part?

This whole exchange is becoming semantic soup. This the result of licence in endeavour.
I write:
Child in arms not slinking waif
Nor embers leaving childhood glow.
She scales into the evening rush
to climb onto the lap and sense the
paternity in corduroy and solvent stains.
Wracked upon the taughtened rope
Within her dollies and her thin nylon
hair, he trips and hooks on brass
battered bindings. You are a mouse,
she cries. No, but I am a small horse.

Now all the above is bollocks. I know because I wrote it. I can write this kind of stuff forever. Some may say I do! But the point is, there IS NO point in obscure verse, except to those who covet it and assign purpose to it; criticise it but at your peril. Because something appears to be nonsense only makes the judgement of it more prone to misconstruance, and that is the extent of the risk that the writer makes. The risk to the critic is much greater because whilst great poetry is constructed according to universally accepted ( or at the very least, recognised) rules, to judge outside the guidelines can lead to the king's new clothes scenario.
What am I babbling on about? Just this. If anyone writes anything which someone does not understand then what is written has failed by some criterion.Live with it or change it. The critic, well intentioned, may say " I fail to grasp the meaning in stanza 2"..........this may well be a statement!
Best,
Tectak

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The bunny is stoic so it stays still I think I just saw a better way to word that. I'll keep it in mind when I revise. Thanks.

Oh, and just in passing, staying bunnies can be blind or brave!