FootprintsintheWind.com

Imagination
Is a tool to
Investigate

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1996

Her hand print fades
from off the glass
closest she could get
as he lies dying
and I, having
sent her away
— was it gently?—
seeing this embrace
too quickly evaporate
grab a marker
to trace its outline

Please pass it on.

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Storyteller seek
your responsibility
to count life’s
moving shadows
currents of heat and cold

:- Doug.

Dive beneath surfaces
fly above
to the cool beyond light

:- Doug.

Why tell your story, if it is not out beyond life and death?

:- Doug.

We see ourselves as separate entities moving about. Yet we interact with others, others are a part of us, and we of they. We move each other. A child is born of two of us, is different yet still of the same wave of history and family and humanity. We are humanity, we have humanicity, which flows in waves. Of those waves are we. We are chosen. And we choose. And we are without choosing.

From star stuff to star stuff
Humans the E=mc2 stuff
Particles and waves we

:- Doug.

Use reason, kindly.

:- Doug.

Do the good work. Write well. Tell well.

:- Doug.

We are leaning things about ourselves and what life presents to us. There is some part of us which does not want to grow. When you resist you cannot get to the other side. How was I to know I would like gardening or beer or spinach?

:- Doug.

To whom might you offer your work, as unto a father or mother of your craft of millennia ago?

:- Doug.

See us into distance or
Hear us into presence
Touch us into intimacy

:- Doug.

Poet, around you feel the shape of the space in which you are working this moment: use that shape to sculpt your song, to hew your rhythms. Pat, push, and stretch spheroids out of cubes, toruses out of pyramids.

:- Doug.

opposites in tension
give us the thing to teach
but how do we find courage
to open our mouth?
heed the brook’s voice

:- Doug.

True growth is in mutating
standard cute baby becomes
engineer who makes, tyrant who imprisons

:- Doug.

Magnify and morph
Throw us off the cliff
Teller, we need you!

:- Doug.

Now I flow
Now I radiate
A teller’s two joys

:- Doug.

Make it large and demanding
Magnify worlds
O Poet!

:- Doug.

Withhold precision
fuzzy frees
imagination to get active
setting the peoples
on a journey

:- Doug.

Not only your characters but your images and the lessons you teach all need contraries, subtexts, struggles, and dilemmas. Otherwise how can they defy like life?

:- Doug.

You need to be a challenge to your reader.

:- Doug.

Water too can be particle and wave.

:- Doug.

The work of the teller and the poet is to start us on our journey, not to describe the inn.

:- Doug.

Nietzsche’s long-remaining cloud
am I
soon lightning

:- Doug.