He found the collapsed house about a half mile off an abandoned dirt road. There was no indication that any human had been around the place in decades. He poked around for a while, watching for rattle snakes. The house seemed to have attained a level of stability. The roof looked fixable. The big rusted iron cook stove was the lynch pin that prevented the collapse of the whole structure. He decided to move in.
He was a poet. A Dada poet. He chose to be alone.
Over the summer months he created his home in the spirit of Hundertwasser.
A small juniper continued to grow through the roof. Sage brush and rabbit brush clustered at the door. He made fertilizer from his own body waste and planted a few of the sunflowers that grew abundantly along the roadsides.
All night and day he spoke his poetry out loud.
It was the coyotes who first appreciated him. They called responses to him every midnight. He spoke his poetry around their calls. Then strangely the range cattle joined in with their own lugubrious notes.
One night a car full of beer drinking teenagers parked on the road below him. Their music was no more than a throaty boom in the night, and he wove his words around the sound.
When the kids heard his peculiar shouts and cries they left quickly and never returned.
For years he stayed in the ruined house, creating poetry of great strangeness.
The BLM people knew he was there, but they didn't bother him until a new manager issued a directive that all dwellers on the public lands must be removed. A woman in a BLM truck came to visit him. He hadn't seen a woman in years, except the fat girl at the gas station where he bought his granola bars.
He thought he was in love.
``I am a poet,'' he said, ``A co-poet with the co-cows and co-coyotes, a cococopoet ...''
He launched into a series of tones and inflections and really quite outdid himself.
The BLM woman was astonished. Then she began to laugh and she laughed until she wept and the poet too wept and the coyotes and cows wept as well and the sound was striking but unfortunately unrecorded.
He rode to town in the BLM truck then hitch hiked on in search for others of his kind.