about 1 am - listening across a coffee table to a friend and colleague, Ron Bayes, the first person I ever knew who spoke poetry as a natural way of speaking.

through a door of self-awareness, realized I’d been listening by concentrating on the center of his head not through his eyes - that I had entered his thoughts otherwise...on the stream of his voice / I picked up a pen and scrap of paper to sketch pretty much this.

realized I could incite an expectation for the literal but delay its recognition and shift your attention to the purely visual by eliminating key details.

first and, finally, saw my visual vocabulary.

relevantly, at the time I was fascinated by the sleight of hand of Chinese landscape artists - painting one part of the paper, they created depth and richness where there was no ink.

most people who looked at this for the first time guessed it was a bird...