I've got a theory I've been working on for a couple of days. It almost feels like a Eureka moment with no payoff *yet. I'm wondering if anyone else wants to help me see if I'm on the right track or if I'm close but got off somewhere. I really feel like I'm on to something here:
it starts by looking at this "statement" with the ampersand:
https://imgur.com/a/NfjBI1) It appears that the statement is saying: "flames and leaves" but not the colored flames, the little white orange ones we've all been ignoring.
2) There are three leaves on/near the ampersand: pointing
left,
up and
down3) There are three leaves on the left side border pointing:
left,
up and
down4) There are orange flames touching these leaves. The one pointing
left is touched by
1 orange/white flame. The one pointing
up is touched by
2 orange/white flames. The one pointing
down is being touched by
3 orange white flames5) The one pointing left appears to me to be indicating flame height (tall). If it was pointing to an actual flame it would appear ambiguous (pointing at color or height?) as you'll see shortly. Also the leaf on the top border is also being touched by 1 orange white flame, it appears to be indicate flame height (short) and is not pointing at a colored flame.
6) The one pointing up and touched by 2 orange white flames appears to indicate outer flame color (yellow)
7) The leaf pointing down and touched by 3 orange white flames appears to indicate inner flame color.
So: it looks to me like it's saying 123 -> height, outer color, inner color
So where to start looking at this pattern? Take the Alphabet Canary path starting with the inner track at the upper left corner and go clockwise, then counter clockwise on the outer track. Using my own notation of outer corners as Captital and inner as lowercase as shown in the image abdcaACDBA
If you take that path and rotate what you are looking at each flame height(tall) outer color (yellow) inner color (green), then the binary string you get starts with 011010. Off to a good start! Since the alphabet_canary found pattern of short flame every six flames, you would always get a 0 for those flames. A fixed value followed by 5 binary values. That could be a hint to check the bacon cypher which would have been an obscure clue before coin_artist posted the poem link now it's a no brainer.
I'm not sure I did it right but when I checked the bacon cypher doing everything as described above taking 6 values (always with a zero up front) and making that a Bacon character i got jibberish. "?JAYWUZUZVY?FM?IQISN?VZ?D" to be exact. It did occur to me that there are 152 flames and if you do this type of thing (looking for three different properties on a rotational basis) you could extract all the data from the flames and end up with a 456 bit binary stream because 152%3 is 2. But I haven't gotten any results that seem promising but my eyes are untrained compared to some of those here.
I'm not discrediting your ideas with the leaves and the orange flames. You may be onto something there.
That said, i have already seperated out lengths (all lengths total, as well as odd lengths only), inner colors, and outer colors. I then combined said strings in every possible combination (without dividing strings into smaller strings) and ran bacon cyphers (v1 and v2) on those combinations from every possible starting point. I've also repeated that process with every possible way of interpretting colors as 0 and 1 (assuming 4 colors), as well as reading everything backwards. I can confidently say there is no bacon message (occasional random word, sure) to be found going this route. Unless you start xoring bits, or reading bits in a different order or some combination of both.