FootprintsintheWind.com

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.

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.

Spoken words conceal us
allow us to lie
Spoken words reveal
something new to us
we had not expected to say
nor had we ever thought
Spoken words accept no edits

:- Doug.

The work is finding our dreams. In reverie, exploring, expanding, growing, re-shaping them. Opening.

Does opening a dream open the dreamer?

Oh, to be a child again, dreaming the clouds floating overhead of a summer’s day! We can! We can!

:- Doug.

Dream is a larger world than metaphor, a pointing out of concrete similarities, a way to communicate a mere concept.

:- Doug.

A door opens
drawing me in
from the cold words in my head

:- Doug.

Metaphor is string on balloon
Dream is loosening our grip
Following

:- Doug.

Image, unanchored, floats
Metaphor grounds us

:- Doug.

Your force dominates the universe
—by exceeding describing

:- Doug.

Hollow, now, for me, are the words success and win and their ilk.

:- Doug.

I am discovering (inventing?) that not only characters and plot need antagonism, pressure, dilemma, and sub-text, but so do metaphors. This gives them life and reality: we see ourselves and our wrestling with our ways. What is the whole metaphor? It is certainly more than the pretty little thing we can mold with our hand. It is alive, and bites.

:- Doug.