Ha. I just remembered why I still love you, after everything.

So do I. It's what separates us and gives us that unique, adorable character men cn't resist.

Dovina's magic - CROWD: You're not levitating. You're just standing there. DOVINA: It's all in having faith like a mustard seed. Everyone levitates. The trick is in doing an unordinary thing. Blaaaat.

It's all there: Guy walks into a bar, drinks a beer, pulls a gun, grabs the girl, runs.

I appreciate your wanting to make them represent all these things, but if you don't try to make them represent AT LEAST ONE OF THOSE THINGS well, you're not doing very good poetry. Ambiguity is 99% of the time just sloppiness.

You can stand in the middle of something. You can't stand in amidst it. There is a journey tree Standing in a wide river Where a waterfall crests Into a sea of fire - is the easiest thing I can think of. Pigeons and doves are the same species. Most "doves" released at dove-releasings are really trained homing pigeons. I was just using someone else's "hypothetical". Unfortunately, it was Dovina's. You're wrong thinking hypothetical implies a "realistic" situation. Recently on poemranker we've had hypothetical worlds where, among other things - humans evolved with hairy asses, - I'm not wearing pants, and - people communicate using only lies. An image like your tree is nice for a color-by-numbers painting over the TV, the kind usually depicting lighthouses standing against the storm, or rainstorms looming over a small Alpine cottage. If you mean it to be a story, or poem, or story-poem, or poem-story, I think you need it to do something. I also think that'll be really hard to do. People who try tend to do one or more of the following things: - Be walking along full of doubt and find the tree, - Be swept along in the river and grab the tree, - Remember the tree from youth and return to find it gone, - Be Samuel T. Coleridge and zonked on Mexican brown.

Ok?

The dove and pigeon are open to interpretation as is most of the poem. They could represent racism, religion, sexism, social hierarchy, etc. The point is, is that they are practically the same but are more often than not percieved as different. The exchanging of feathers is the dissolving of these kinds of illusions. In my personal view (but this doesn't have to be the only view) The birds are actually a critique of the actual theme itself. Saying why save some and not all, why call some a pigeon and some a dove? In that way the poem is as hypocritical as life itself.

You can stand in the middle of a stream or shallow river just ask fly fisherman. Come on your really nit-pickin' with the whole strung together phrase thing. But if you make a suggestion that maintains the rhythm of the poem I'll be very greatful. One would imagine logically that both river and falls end in a sea of fire. It relates to journeys because it's at the end of the journey for those who make it to the tree, because its where you would want to be. Sorry about the lack of punctuation and waterfall misspelling. The birds can represent a lot of things but originally the idea came from noticing how simular doves and pigeons are and yet how differently their percieved and treated. The exchange of feathers being the desolving of this illusion between the two. PS: If you take the personified meanings of the birds it becomes sort of a critique saying that the innocent and the gullable aren't so far off from each other. I thought more symbolic or fictional than hypothetical. Hypothetical tends to imply a realistic situation to me. I was inspired to write this when one day I saw a tree standing in the middle of a stream. I made it a river to make the tree appear more powerful. The rest is just metaphor for a story that in itself was a metaphor for a story (Not that you needed or even wanted to know that). I look foward to your tutelage.

i wear a skirt?

are you sleepy? can you be specific? was the first version better?

As I said above, I actually started with the title. And I agree with you, I never thought this one was much good. I just couldn't get the wording right.

Thanks for the warning. I wasn't going to buy it anyway.

Ha. The word "bland" seems too bland. Game, set, match.