And here is the complete text to The Night Bird in a nice clean computer font!
mmm... computer font....
The Night Bird
E.Armanious
Night after night after night, I watched my lovers sleep. I watched them dream, the twitches and moans of the Everyman in his beautiful slumber. So I began to take notes on these strange creatures, so unlike their daylight brothers, the beasts of the night, huffing and puffing. I began to translate their speech, their jumbled monologues, their terrible cries, their solitary and infectious sighing. I compiled great forests of books, a wilderness of stolen dreams. There were mangroves of pleasure filled with lost lovers, unspeakably beautiful in their absences; rain forests, green and glowing with laughter and intoxication; and terrible, dark woods where even the trees were too frightening to name.
By day I would mask the scent of midnight with flowers, I would thread them through my tangled hair and hide them in my underwear and walk amongst the wakeful with a pretty smile. But by night I would crawl on hands and knees with bloodshot, sleepless eyes, in rags held together with pieces of red thread, ravenous for the dreams of the enchanting creatures. I wanted to be one of them, oh, to close my eyes and fall and fall and fall into that embrace.
My catalogues and forests of dreams only made me more desperate and I would write around between the pages of my books. I would smear myself in ink and tear out my hair, my body began to consume itself, revealing new angles and unseen structures, and one night I swallowed my tongue. And between my clenched jaws, blood drowned my cries.
So I became a mute, thinking only of cannibalism and castration. Then I heard it, softly and from a far off place in my forest. The call of the Night Bird
