At seventeen he mimicked the hobo's ice-cube throat,
rolling his tongue around vowels
and striking jagged consonants against alley walls.
He saw in a disheveled gray coat an island shepherd
bundled against February, and said so;
he imagined dangling wind chimes lazing about the skin
of a rotten apple, over ghostly groans,
and laughed like a bigot clad in grease-stained shirt,
knowing that baseness was snoring outside.

At twenty-one he became some mud-stained native,
wearing his miner's hard hat like a medicine man.
An exhausted glance at the morning paper told of
painted wraiths thumping staves to call attention to their privates,
confronted with a European-made radio;
he grinned into frozen waffles.
Washing machine repair slips got lost in a catacomb of bills,
the impossibly-colored stains remained.

At twenty-five he choked on a pink slip shoved into his face
by some pasty man with rolling marble eyes constantly
sweeping away, like purple-green sludge beneath a cracked pier.
He planted sooty kisses on his child's head,
and inched down the highway in a powder-blue rescue project
from the local auto graveyard. One finger on the wheel,
he sang country badly, staggering between keys like his mining friends
making one last stab at glory in the Royal Badger pub.
He avoided the whistling of Ohio wind like death itself.

At twenty-nine his sullied white flag had been repossessed,
he looked at week-old cheese like the Gordian Knot post-Alexander.
Anything that could melt in saliva made him weep;
his pursuit of a rotten apple was Biblical.
He slid in ragged gangs from one gas station to the next,
trying to keep his teeth from tinkling when, gas pump in hand,
he bowed to patrons in what he suspected was medieval fashion.
Tourists mistook him for a vampire; he avoided mirrors.
Silently, he choked on ice-cubes;
he had the stomach but not the heart
to hang himself with irony.