My friend wears his coat like a skin peeled from a molting elk. Patches cover holes in the elbows made by leaning against brick walls to catch his breath or falling on broken glass.
His pockets had once been cornucopias milk-toothed children drowned in. Candies poured out in cascades of foil, wax paper and plastic wrap.
Hands, lightly powdered with icing sugar perfumed the air around him with the scent of caramel.
Suffused with thews refused even Midas, everything he touched turned to chocolate, honey and smiles… but now, vacant of liquorice, lint, money, mints, his pocket linings contain less air than shredded banderoles flapping on abandoned cannon scarred battlefields.
Those once confectionary hands swapped candy canes for walking sticks.
He trudges along the sidewalk through quicksand thick crowds on legs more numb than a spree killer, at the pace of a wounded man fighting a snowstorm conjured just for him.
This illness, called ‘old friend’ in mixed company (he smokes his weight in cannabis) hangs on him like a drunken boatswain carried aboard after shore leave by the only mate holding his liquor.
This ‘old friend’ demyelinates desecrates nerve tissue reduces neural pathways to shriveled river beds leaving dead end streets strewn with discarded bundles of axons.
My friend wears his skin the same way a coat hanger wears a bathrobe. It dangles on threadbare shoulders like defeat, a race worn down by centuries under the lash.
Through it all he smiles, a good sport fighting through sludge day after day after day, dragging one good foot ahead of the other before it shrinks away.