I bought a copy, but it wasn’t mine.
I stole a copy. Still it felt somehow
as if it did not yet belong to me.
As if I did not yet belong to it.
So I sat down to write it. As the sun
fingered the moon’s pale skin and shed its own,
my fingers made my pen push glossy ink
across the page. Out in the fields, the cows
sang ancient songs of mourning and of mating,
while in the boxes that contained the humans,
the humans sat before their boxes. Still 
I wrote, and though I did not comprehend
even an insubstantial fragment of 
what that blood-thick black ink was saying, what
I knew was that when it was done, I’d have
grown older, the grimy globe would have grown older,
and on my shelf would sit my book, a shrunken
governor of an antique Chinese province,
surveying all that came within his purview,
including me, and passing judgment on it.