Now we come to the study of blind ravens. We expiate the Gobi, we retract even the Punjab’s coals. I wear a black cape and conjugate burnt particles of popcorn. I keep coming up with the number one, no matter how many times I count my toes. It seemed necessary to sleep with the eye open. Even if it meant wearing a mask, I could somehow see more deeply into the blind depths of my past. I could run guns, again, to Shoa with Rimbaud. When the fire ants from Namibia arrived, they were more than a memory. I knew they had invisibly implanted themselves below the skin and could be traced to my vigorous eczema. Psoriasis of the scrotum? Fierce bouts of almost-kissing? Inflammation of the preterit as one way to measure the jungle girth of my mouth? Decrepit blind Java sparrow as indicative of how to hop again on one foot, even as an adult? You’re fed up, you tell me, that I keep inscribing my name throughout the tough wall of your intestinal tract. You believe I have eaten the poisonous plant, and—in eating me—you’ve invested the blind camel. Let me assuage any childhurt, let me assure. I’ve never been inside you the way two people were meant to bleed. My lapwing sting might be thrown as bones for dice. I am comfortably afar, counting my toes—cold-blooded—up to the number one. That writing inside you may or may not be sparrow, be blind, become, is more like bird track, I hear, or frustrated fists of ordinary cabbage railing to get out.