To begin with, none of that “Nevermore” kaka. That’s the last time you’ll hear me say that word, and strike me down if it’s otherwise. If it starts to slip out while I’m snoozing, it means my subconscious ain’t getting with the program, is being one of those spitball-spewers when the teacher is laying down some chalk knowledge. You see that happening, don’t stand there idly. Toss a pebble at me, send my feathers aflutter, and when I come awake with a start, let’s keep things going by swinging pillows at each other like giddy sleepover virgins still coming down off their Moose Tracks sundae high.

We are forever in the shadow of our forefather, Raven-of-ravens. He was a shapeshifter who got laid a good deal more than any of us. Opportunistic and wily, he was also, as it turns out adept in bed, if I may borrow your vernacular for a few moments, your euphemistic word-gesso. Us we don’t need beds—a branch will do, though I myself enjoying doing it in the road around a blind curve for an added thrill. Mostly, though, that’s fantasy—we know how to preserve ourselves, sense exactly how far we can commit into the nipping at some eagle’s tail to get at the salmon he’s snagged before he’s going to whirl around and turn talons on us. It’s a harsh reality out there, and the risk-averse petered out long ago.
Raven-of-ravens, whether or not you believe in him, in his literal reality, knew how to take a risk. He’d gussy himself up as a fisherman whom he’d already convinced to go wandering off somewhere, led as blindly as the salmon itself toward its spawn. Meanwhile, mimicking to the very scar and waders the hubby, taking a scrapeful of his scent like a stamp of authenticity, Raven would slip into the house and move toward the wife, waiting a day till she was lonely and he could boast of having come home early, laying down salmon-flop on the table, silver-soon-to-be-pink aphrodisiac, and then, taking her to bed, feeling the fullness of human flesh, the way bodies fit together to a degree his own kind never could, Raven-of-ravens would have his way with her. But do you really believe she didn’t suspect, at some level knowing that this was an imposter? I figure he’d relocate the scar an inch lower, mingle the scent with something corvine, tip her off that he was an interloper, that she was at once with two, the actor and the part played. For the seduction to be complete, you see, Raven-of-ravens must have wanted her to know that she was being tricked and yet go ahead with it anyway.

I’m going to save you a lot of time and energy that you might otherwise spend on grant proposals, time that you can now spend with your kids or making kids or huffing and puffing on your treadmill, as I’ve seen you do sometimes through the window, or playing with your Wii, if you can find all the equipment, which you’re constantly misplacing, and which sometimes I’ve been known to abscond with, or sneaking around with your neighbors, as I’ve seen many of you do, or building sleek boats, as I’ve seen others of you do, too, smoothing the wood and making it curve like one of our breasts. You who feel the need to break down the world, parse it into its numeriad parts, accelerate its particles until, under the interrogation of blistering speed, they yield up new parts. You, who feel the need to earn your keep, who stiffen yourselves in rigid garb, who prove yourselves through work, the more monotonous the better (easier to sound a note than a polyphony, I guess). All the trouble of figuring out what it is that we are doing and thinking, why we are acting the way that we are—I’m going to give you a shortcut. I’m going to tell it all, reveal it to you, spill-all tabloidally.

I have long wondered what you want from us. What will understanding our behavior really mean to you—what difference will it make? Will it truly bring you any measure of happiness to know why we are the way we are? Do you stand to gain by emulating our behavior, learning our secrets and our tricks? Will it shorten your wars a week or two? Would you take money out of your war coffers to devote to studying us, as if we were something of suspicion to you, some huddling cult of would-be bombers? Or are you in pursuit of some purer knowledge? There’s no such thing, methinks. No, you want something from us, otherwise you would hardly have fixed up that cabin in the woods, long abandoned and slouched and rotted, nor would you have trained your instruments on us, color-banding our legs and holding out a microphone to record our every call as if each one might have some significance, might be the secret decoder ring to our whole being.

Very well. The thing is, though—and I don’t know whether this will hurt or help, will steal your thunder or whether we can just share thunder—I’d rather just tell you things straightaway. For one thing, we’re not as interesting as maybe you make us out to be, and for another we get very annoyed, many of us, by your constant scrutiny, your poking around at us, your eying us—anyone would think it was you that had beaks.

First off, the shiny, why we are drawn to it, the baubles and the buttons, the novelty of the new. You seem to have this idea—I take this from the jargon-heavy articles you leave lying around—that it is somehow that we are drawn to the shiny because it pays off eventually in foodstuff to pick and poke at everything. Of course, the world was not always full of so many shiny things—in recent centuries you’ve slagged a bunch of it into the open, fashioning round objects that look like little suns left lying around. So, anyway, the way you’ve got it, it’s basically like a numbers game. If we leap at anything with a glint, we’ll wind up wined and dined. If we don’t, maybe we starve. A rather insulting view of us, wouldn’t you say, as if we are no more intelligent than one of your computer algorithms, “programmed” as it were, rather than creatures of free will.

The fact is that we love the new for its own sake, for its novelty, not blindly but because each new thing augments the world for us, however slightly. It’s not that we aren’t critical beings who are unaware of the risks inherent in being at the mercy of the new. No; rather, mentally we catalogue each new item and add it to our view of all existence, the multiverse. Our collective consciousness, in fact, posits an object that is ever-shifting, ever new, like the Raven-of-ravens himself, that in time would undergo all states of matter, would become every answer to every game of Twenty Questions, an object that would forget itself again and again, truly a memento, to put it in terms of one of your finer filmic fantasies.

And what about your own lust for novelty? Before you go throwing stones, take a look at 1) your beverage racks, 2) the chip aisle. (eg. Profusions of Pringles, I notice, in recent years. What happened? For decades, the Pringle meanders along, flatliner of a chip, notable mostly for its stackability and its eerie smoothness, like if Barbie’s hips were made of potatos and then stripped from her body. Then, one day, seven-count’ em-seven different kinds of Pringles. Punctuated equilibrium, I think, is your term for it.) 3) Your pornography collections 4) Your music consumption. Do you really need all that? Do you really even listen to all that? With how many sets of ears? If you could soundproof each of your ears from the other you could listen to two at once and still never get through it all. The only difference is that we recognize that we love the new, own it.

Your neophilia is mostly just amusing to us, but this need to know, to study us, to follow us, to “sound out our notes” to quote one of your great wordsmiths, a raven among men…it goes too far. It fucks things up. When you kidnap our young and strangulate them with twisty-ties so that they yak up their meals just so that you can know the exact contents of what we are eating? Your so-called Geneva Conventions, do they allow for such tactics toward the young? But no, we’re only birds, right? Birdbrains. We flock together, mindlessly. We rise early to feed. We haunt when Hitchcock directs us to. News for you—I’m an individual. I, for instance, love olives, the black ones, sun-cured, dried and crinkly as raisins, as bulging snowman eyeballs (just credit me when you use the idea this winter). The pits. I’ve noticed you don’t eat your pits. What nonsense, this subtraction. That added pinch in the throat…that is the very essence of the sublime.

This time you’ve gone too far.

One of you, the one who fixed up the cabin and has been living out here in the woods about half of the days of the week, has gone so far as to try to pass himself off as one of us. As if we can’t tell the difference between the moon and a volleyball. As if one compiled from the feathers from a bunch of black boas and a combination of Goth hair and blackface could truly pass for one of our own. I don’t know who should be more offended, the original members of Siouxsie and the Banshees, African-Americans, or us. Even the Trojans knew that the horse wasn’t an actual, flesh-and-blood horse. At first we thought maybe it was pure theater, designed to entertain us, but he stayed in the woods and appeared to be trying to do an impression of one of us to the point that at times seemed a rude mimickry, the sort of mocking one sees in caricature, the kind without political agenda, the kind done on street corners with talking dummies. At one point this person was hunched over a slab of beef—the giveaway was that it was cooked, as if the meat we partake in is decked out in spices, mallet-pounded by a chef who thinks of meat the way a potter thinks of clay, something to be molded, shaped, trimmed, eventually to emerge and be fired upon the kiln of the grilltop, carcinogenically striped, and then eaten in front of us by a man who’d just been fully costumed moments earlier—is it not an insult to think that we would not be able to recognize this same individual?

There’s only one of you who really seems to get us. Wallace Stevens, your poet of supreme fiction. I’m not even talking about the “13 Ways,” although that’s not bad. I’m more a fan of “O, Florida, Venereal Soil.”

On the flip side, the “poet” who grasps us least of all—one initialed E.A.P., “eep” as he is known among us, and if you have ever heard us rendering that sound into the air you know that we are disparaging, showing our disdain. When a fellow traveller tries to peel away the bark under which I’ve carefully deposited the kill that I waited for patiently, biding my time while a pair of coyotes rent the flesh with their teeth, coyotes whom I kept nourished with stories and jests while they chewed, only to have the reward for my work, the strand of flesh, poached by some lazy carrion-bird—that is the type of thing worthy of an “eep.” When I pour my heart into the pursuit of some charming creature, say one whose wit sparkles like a dropped coin, and she turns away from me in favor of someone who just happens to be higher in the hierarchy, well that, too, is guaranteed to get an “eep.” Of course, by writing a poem in which the only word we say is “Nevermore”—and believe me, it makes me shudder to utter it even once—EAP set back any faint hope of understanding us a hundred years.