Yellow light is coming out of his head 
fighting snakes
spit venom
he's holding a hockey stick and slapping pucks through window panes
but it's just an old barn
we're planning to tear it down next week anyway, and take the big old beams for our living room
it's the trend these days
we'll impress our visitors, maybe even get into a magazine
but slim, there, wearing his goalie's mask and  slapping those pucks
we'll have to lock him up in the cellar again

he's always telling guests to “fuck off!” and his breath smells bad and he's missing a couple of teeth – well to be more exact, two of his teeth were broken off a few years ago. He never had them treated so they've just been rotting away in his head. He likes the pain, i guess, but we knew that.

He used to burn himself with matches and stuff... cut scratches into his skin with razor blades and whatnot. Said it was art, performance art, because he did it in the big old rusty bathtub in the yard, and he had some heavy dissonant music playing. He'd taped posters, with a picture of a weed-eater cutting a flower to shreds, to telephone poles – advertising a one-time only performance of his “piece” GER, or Green Earth Red.

And then the day arrived, and actually a few people had wandered to our house out of curiosity or boredom, and Slim started playing his heavy dissonant CD, stripped off his clothes, never acknowledging the presence of anybody, stepped into the bathtub and proceeded to cut himself with the razor.
One woman was talking loudly about how disgusting it all was and that somebody should stop him, but nobody really wanted to. The fact was, anybody from the town probably wanted to cut Slim themselves, but to see him inflict wounds to his own body was  even better.

Slim stole everything from everybody. We all knew it, but nobody could catch him or prove anything. The police even raided our place a couple times, responding to complaints, but they found nothing. Videotapes of his thieving just showed a shadowy figure with no identifiable features. He was good at it, I guess. 

It started with candy when he just ten years old. His friend Jason showed him how, while the clerk was looking away or distracted with another customer, to count loudly “One, two, three...” meanwhile stuffing handfuls of  penny-malt balls into the paper bag, so that he might have bagged up to three-hundred of them, but only counted forty, and the clerk never bothered to check. From there, he moved on to bicycles to trash cans to old Mrs Crawford's teapot collection. 

Still don't know what he did with all that stuff.