Originally posted on The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts:
Athletes and musicians practice, and consider small matters of mechanics, precisely so that they do not need to think about them in performance. Like an actor who memorizes lines perfectly, the artist can concentrate on the performance, the feeling, confident that the means, acquired…

Originally posted on The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts:
  You can’t write poetryyou put it down in words like a jazzman does you sink your earsinto sound float along…………….till it’s all around wander through its winds ………………..its leavestill the night mindtakes you ……………….on down………………………….down…………………..down then you slide back roundtouch another scale……………………………lift that…

Originally posted on The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts:
  Do you hear them? In the wind, the voices. The rattling in the eaves, the swirl of leaves,the tumble-weeds rolling across the desert floor,the dust slicing into your eyes, the sunlike a white god sitting on the mountain top:a toad on the horizon; we look…

Originally posted on The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts:
  Scientists who know such things call it Aralia spinosa,but down home we knew it as the Devil’s Walkingstick.Prickly to the touch like an old woman’s barbs, it would bite you if you tried to pluck that purple fruit; in August (when goats flow…

Originally posted on The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts:
  She used to gather the bark and leaves in fall, after summer’s roaming and philandering; she’d boil it all down to nothing but an extract, an ugly mess of oil, thick and gluey, pale yellow; but I can attest to those times when…