A boy wearing a yellow raincoat ***** a silver plastic gun in one hand and grips the inside of a melted chocolate with the other. His stance is firm and poised rendering the expressions of his heroes-or rather his fathers’ figures on the wall of a studio apartment he visits once a week. All four corners memorized. He stares now from the bottom of a street. He chews bubblegum, the color of his grandmother’s blush or a slapped wrist. “It takes heart to be mean” he’s told. For all we know he wants to be the saint and the antagonist but it doesn’t show, it’s not registered between smirks and spits. He’s been frozen-food fed since he was weaned off his mother’s milk and affection. Sometimes he plays with the snakes in the backyard of the girl he’s in love with They give him a cigarette and call him lonesome cowboy bill So the wounds heal and the days grow shorter The siren of the ice cream truck become a wake-up call as they turn into the screams of men in blue uniforms the sugar melts between the warm asphalt and no one notices a child go missing when the bus drives away in the kid’s place lies a keychain and a school lunch bag hope comes in the shape of a old taxi with a skeleton in the driver seat snakes becoming criminals in the shadows There’s a ticket for the crossroads but he ends up in Nevada, our charlatan warrior his girl-child neighbor loses a tooth in the dark and the zipper of her favorite jeans he doesn’t call and she doesn’t answer he changes his name and grows scars on his knuckles, he wants to be like the man in the car commercials, he wants to rid himself of his accent instead he acquires a taste for cheap alcohol, an asphyxiating penchant for street powders and scrapes up enough money for soft leather boots that make a clacking sound when he walks quickly He stares now from the bottom of a street and walks up to a payphone. I want to go home; he whispers this into his wallet. But there’s nothing in there except for phone numbers he doesn’t recognize and worn midnight shakes. His hands tremble. A man wearing a red suede jacket ***** a silver pistol in his hands. He’s gone back home but it’s different now the studio apartment has turned into a new casino complex and his father lives in the cemetery. He brings roses. He doesn’t feel quite natural in the urgencies of life, this goon hero of ours His childhood sweetheart wears lacquered nails and has grown a beer belly he wades in her backyard for a bit, the ****** in his palms for leaving, for drifting when he could have stayed still he spits and it evaporates the snakes are nothing to the the devil in his eyes A man wearing a red suede jacket ***** a silver pistol in his hands and fires there’s a moment of silence a bird chirps in the distance the heat lingers there’s confusion and then just a man in the corner of a street with an open mouth and a crooked sincerity for all the things you have to do to be lonesome cowboy bill