the most feared man in the west was the blind cowboy, overdosed on his own vision & woke up sweating and blind, without
any conciousness. in his malarial awakening. a man of few words, the blind cowboy claimed his fever boiled
individuality from each of his cells.
he crawled out in the desert country like an animal, leaving a swathe of furrowed sand in his wake. they said later
that it was as though some serpent of vast size had coiled itself out from the between the houses & his mother believed
that some freak sidewinder had digested her son, convinced the sheriff to mount a pursuit.
not a trace of the boy or snake did they find. the truth of the matter that the lad followed the warmth of the setting
sun through that arid, red baked plain until he lay swaddled in the howls of the coyotes & the hiss of the sand carried
up by the winds of the desert.
the blind cowboy flew in the face of tradition by becoming so immersed the ways of life that he could fire his gun without
moving his hand or even owning a gun.
it was said he carried a colt peacemaker hidden deep inside his head.
men who fought with him found themselves heartshot and bleeding, never even having met him. some were stillborn from
their mothers wombs with only a look of suprise & a birthmark in the shape of a pointing finger.
those forty days and nights, in the finest biblical tradition, seemed to have formed the sleek, confident character
that the blind gun became in later years.
it was said that the rabbits and the lizards would lower themselves into his open mouth, some even taking the time
to brush the sand off his tongue as he lay open mouthed in the dust. springs no more than a trickle would
swell with water just to reach his parched throat.
when he lay there all but insensible to the world that pulsed around him, his conciousness spread out like the fingers
of a hand reaching out into the dark
& plugged itself in. if you were to suck on your finger, stick it into a light socket, you would have seen what the
blind gun saw. a vision , like all great visions, that words can only give us the faintest reflection of.
the blind gun distanced himself completely from space & time. if the buddha made the sand run backwards, the blind
gun unmade the hour glass, turned the
grains back into a mountain, the mountain into cloud, the cloud into light.
