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In poetry, some things can stand for other things.

This is called Symbolism.

In Mickey’s Book of Life, Love, and Laughter, certain silly symbols are commonly found.

Cardinals are the little red songbirds that never fly away when the winter comes.

A cardinal symbolizes courage, fortitude, and profound persistence.

When Mickey sees a cardinal, he stupidly thinks it’s a good omen.

Cardinals deliver the will and favor of God Himself.

This is why Catholic Cardinals can become Pope.

Fauns are creatures of Greek Myth, naked young boys or girls,

With horns of a goat and tails of a deer, living in the forest.

In Mickey’s stupid head, they symbolize sensuality and oneness with nature.

Fauns are what Mickey is trying to be when

He takes off his clothes and claims to be a nudist.

The ship with pink sails is a symbol too.

It is a symbol of Mickey’s imagination,

Especially the imagination that shows up in Mickey’s dreams.

It sometimes appears as a 1957 pink and white Mercury,

My dad’s car until it was destroyed in the Belmond tornado of 1966.

Today’s picture is a potential Sci-Fi character for a Cissy Moonskipper story.

For fashion’s sake, I had to try another space suit. Of course, we have still forgotten the glove on the hand. This kid is in for a bit of severe frostbite if he goes out the airlock like this.

As I had drawn the character nude before applying the background and costume, I decided to put him into a skinny-dipping situation (in a more progressive town than Dallas.)

I decided to draw a picture that might help my friends and family understand a little bit why I like being a nudist. This is a picture of what it feels like to be clothed only in sunshine. The freedom is a very real thing. I have pictured it here not with a picture of myself, but of a sunshiny boy that represents me before the age of ten, before the sexual assault I endured in secret which plunged my psyche into darkness.

I finished both of these pictures, created from the same original doodles, on my new computer tablet with a digital drawing app. The second one has Sunshine Boy in an ISU t-shirt because that is where I learned to overcome the trauma from the assault. Ultimately I overcame my fear of being nude.

I now have a much bigger and more useful touchscreen canvas to draw on. It has made picture-making even easier for this old coot with arthritic hands and encroaching color blindness. I am no longer despairing about not being able to draw. I drew the picture of the space boy using the tablet, my electronic stylus, my fingers, and a photo/art-editing program called AI Mirror. (Not the same as Dall-E in that it operates from the picture I draw, not the description I write. I don’t believe I am plagiarizing anyone’s original artwork in that this not-really AI program does not interpret my artwork by reproducing someone else’s art. Instead, it interprets and realigns my art using what it knows from photos and a generalized anime filter.)

This is how I use it. I draw a figure to the best of my current ability. My hands shake and my arthritic joints seize up and crackle. I can guide the stylus better than this picture above, but not all the time. I can also refine and redo the details.

I can continue to refine things to a point like you see above, I tighten things up, zoom in, and work on smaller details. Eyes get a lot of attention, especially after I discovered it was the anime filter in the editing program that was making some of my creations cross-eyed.

The AI Mirror program is a sort of Photoshop editor that can merge my drawing with photo-quality costumes, backgrounds, and props. It leaves me with a picture I can actually feel proud of.

I have been getting tired of the tiny screen on my phone where I have been relentlessly drawing like my drawing talent is about to run out… because it is. I finished setting it up today, but I haven’t finished anything else on it. So, today I give you drawings I did on that Lilliputian screen.

This is the first figure drawn on the new Android Tablet.

Arriving in 1874, Robert was born more Frost than snow,

And yet he made a genius poem of watching snow in fields, you know.

The thing about him and his work, you see,

Is the quiet observation, the detail, the sensibility.

He could look at stone walls badly in need of mending,

And see two neighbors, working together, and sharing a satisfactory ending.

And when two roads in a yellow wood he surmises,

The one less traveled leads to four Pulitzer Prizes.

This is a poet you need to meet before you are dead.

Everyone thrives with a little Frost bestowed on their head.

*Note*

This is a poem about a poet written in couplets, pairs of rhyming lines, the poor man’s building blocks of poetry. Please notice that this poem, written by a pretty terrible poet (hey, at least I’m pretty) is about one of the greatest poets that ever lived. Back in 1969, though Frost was recently no longer living, I had to memorize and recite Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” I was one of only three seventh graders who did it correctly. Later, as a teacher, I would make speech classes memorize and recite it too, though they only had to get one stanza correct to pass it. Putting yourself in that poem by reading it aloud is a mystical experience that transforms you forever into a more aware and awakened human being.

Teach me now, oh wise one…

…Because I have to know…

…Where the wide world comes from…

…And where it must surely go.

…Teach us now, oh foolish ones…

What proofs of reason can you show?

Teach them now, old ones…

…With white hair on your heads…

…Teach them now what they must know…

…Before we all are dead!

We all must share our knowledge…

…What little of whatever we know…

…And all of us must become teachers…

Before our last chances all go!