As a man, I’m ugly. My whiskers are sparse and gray and my nose is round with red and blue spider webs, my eyes are naturally bloodshot and a nasty scar craters my left cheek.

I am ugly because I’m poor. I can’t afford hot water, my hot water heater burnt out when the pump died, I have to hike to the creek to get water and put it on the wood stove and I can’t stand in the bathtub since rats have taken over the drain now the water doesn’t work so I have to stand in the yard, naked, and pour hot water on myself which I don’t like to do: I probably stink. My teeth are bad, they hurt; my breath stinks because I’m poor. I’m poor because I’m ugly and no one will hire such an ugly man when fair faced young men are looking for work. I’m waiting for a break, I’ve been waiting for years; I’m old. I’m ugly, smelly, poor, and old.

I’m ugly because my old dog Duke was blind in his left eye socket and I’m dyslexic and don’t remember which is his left. I leaned over one day when Duke was asleep and said, "hey, Dog, you’re farting, go crap" and it was his left side, and he bit a nice piece of my cheek about the size of a German Shepherd’s mouth, and it hung from my face by a strip of skin and I put alcohol on it and pushed it into place with duct tape, but after a few days the hunk died and came off with the tape, and my cheek healed but it left a nasty, nasty scar. Good old Duke, his mouth was cleaner than a human mouth, cleaner than my mouth because I’m poor.

I’m poor because people don’t trust such an ugly man. If there’s an apple in the barrel with some scab and a wormhole and a spot of rot, you’ll bet that’s the last apple in the barrel. If there’s a horse in the corral with fire patch and weepy eye and putrid frog, that’s the horse that will stand when others run. If there’s a girl at the dance with a missing ear and crooked mouth and hog nose, she’ll be the last girl to dance, but I’d be happy to dance with her but she wouldn’t dance with me. People don’t trust such an ugly, smelly, poor old man, not to dance with and hold you close, and not to work in your office, and not even to chop your wood or sit your kids.

Bill at the café gives me a bologna sandwich every day if I’ll eat it behind the café; I’m constipated. The realtor gives me a fiver not to sit on the steps of houses for sale; damp steps give me ferdlie of the bung. When cops see me hitchhiking out of town, they don’t arrest me, they give me a ride to the county line and bump my head getting me out. The Reverend Noddy comes to my house to talk about Jesus, so I don’t have to sit in his church on Sunday; his Jesus is a Jesus I understand.

I sit by the river and the stones don’t know I’m ugly, and the water sparkles at me and tickles my hands, and birds sing for me like I was pretty. It’s just when a claim-holder comes that I might be stealing.

Sometimes when it’s warm I sit on the bridge and watch the kids play in the river. Their skin is clean, their faces shine, their joints don’t hurt, they don’t have gas, their dog ain’t dead, the sun shines on them. To be so pretty, to move so free, they shout and laugh loud with being young; to be young. The cop watches me, but I’m way up high on the bridge, far away from the kids in the river; I’d have to jump from the rail to reach the kids, and then I’d be dead, neck busted, floating on my back through a shoal of screaming children with my ugly old face looking up right at God, who made me so ugly for so long. Then, they’d pull me from the willow roots and put me wet to mold in a cold hole and one day someone would say, "what happened to that poor, old, smelly, ugly ugly man?"