FootprintsintheWind.com

Life must develop
poet: your work!

:- Doug.

of rocks and cloud
what is their
conversation?

:- Doug.

Our fear of heights is first a fear of falling, then a fear of death.

:- Doug.

Words of craft

:- Doug.

I read a book. I catch a term. I re-make it as mine. Such is my decisive act. I make.

:- Doug.

We might invite the generations into creative acts of story and poetry. Suggestions can travel, echo from mountaintop to hillside, unheard in some valleys. We may make our special language, a babble only we two know. What can I grasp of your ways and you of mine? Yet.

:- Doug.

Our times are soaked, perhaps obsessed, with visual images. Recognizing this we may expand our repertoire to other senses and thus aspire to converse across centuries with those of a different sensibility.

:- Doug.

What is common among us, I in this year, you 300 years on? What is humanity that we might speak together?

:- Doug.

Let us decriminalize poverty.

:- Doug.

What is the relationship between a living writer and a reader who will never meet face to face nor exchange correspondence? That can be a model for our relationship with 300-year grandchild elders.

:- Doug.

The poet’s image
shakes us
to invent anew
while conversing
with the poet

:- Doug.

Whole worlds breathe
upon the hairs of your neck
defying the world in your head

:- Doug.

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1995

Stay with your invitation when it draws objection. You have ruffled the hairs of someone’s imagination. You are doing them good, pushing a bit of humanity out of its nest.

Please pass it on.

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Why does almost no one boast of having seen the last robin of autumn?

:- Doug.

You can always think
of something else to say
Don’t

:- Doug.

There is in your story and purpose more than you have found so far of nuance, depth, and richness, of astonishment, and provocation. Stay and explore.

:- Doug.

Go beyond words through feelings, such as lostness, quandary, strength, to what is on the other side: to what first demanded to be said, to the startlingly strange.

:- Doug.

He has no respect for you. He makes up what he tells you.

:- Doug.

What does light do? Washes in waves, showers with particles, bounces, dims, sharpens, brightens, dulls, flickers, blinds, guides, clears, calms, dazzles, glows, glistens, glimmers, cools, warms, wanes, twinkles, colors, winks, blazes. When you hold me in the light, what did you mean for me?

:- Doug.

We embroider our stories, but do we recognize what stitches we withheld?

:- Doug.

Make a world. This is your work, O Writer, whether the form is literary or reportorial. Make a world for your Reader to walk through, to inhabit, to wrestle.

:- Doug.

What is the wonderment of dementia? Of accompanying one with differences (no, I do not write “challenges” which would presume too much)?

:- Doug.

You, sir, are the fake. Of course he knows this. That’s why he repeats the word so.

:- Doug.