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