when a star leaves a smoke signal

This is excellent.  I don't need to tell you why.  You knew so when you wrote it.  

Campfires save more lives than stars do, btw.  

That's a good little fact to know. Thank you 😊.  I'm glad you enjoyed.

My comment about campfires verses stars, regards their output.  And thusly in yours.  Don't sell yourself short.  Nobody gathers around stars.  But they do campfires.  There's your power.
You are a very good writer.

Thank you ❤

I've been reading you for nearly 10 years.  We've all been through changes. I see nothing reduced. I sense nothing lost. I see a flame that has been honed to a sparkling blue, metal melting, enigma of directed consciousness. The world is, as you have stated, a fire without a heart, and it no longer bares itself in the after hours of spiritual integrations and ontological sensorium. But your ability to nail it on the head is undiminished, and I continue, as I always have for a decade, to read yours first, ahead of your peers here, unashamedly admitting that through injury and heartbreak, loss and depression, heartache and sensation, your work, and therefore ostensibly you, have helped to keep at least a single toe of me grounded in the reality that lives on beyond my delusionary expectations and their inevitable disappointments. Where there's smoke there's still a fucking fire. When Stephen Crane wrote of the Civil War in America, he did it through the memories of soldiers who still endured on the Bowery streets of NYC. Crane was 4 years old during the war. But he lived and worked in the soup lines, looking into the faces of sheer humanity, and his effort at understanding reality created The Red Badge of Courage. Critics tackled him about it. How could such a young man understand a thing before his time? He crawled into the embers, he dug at the truth, he revived the truth, and he created a monument to the rebirth of a nation. He was there at the moral foundation of the 21st Century. I have read your work. I still read your work. There is not a doubt in my mind: You are too humble to admit to yourself; you are on fire with insight and a depth of understanding that most people never even know exists. I read Crane once a year to reset my clock. I read you every day you're available. It challenges me to forge ahead. It inspires me out on my complacency. It rigorously pushes me to know that I can ill afford to merely stand by and allow life to run over me. I'm not gushing. I'm giving you feed back. Advice? Now is the time to pull together all those words and formulate the thesis of its ingenuity. A Birmingham jail is the perfect place to write that singular note. In the hills above Tinntern. On the shores of Dover. Overlooking the Oxbow in Connecticut. On the beach of Normandy.  This is your moment. Give em hell. Every damn day.

Thank you RT. This means so much. It's easy for me to forget where I've come from, when I get lost where I am. I appreciate your words more than I can say.

I'm 68. I've reinvented myself more times than I can count.

I count on it.

It's always something. And then it's something else.