Whiskey Bill was on the brink!
He'd learned to balk the balk
and blink the blink.
His stint no longer stunted,
his pint for good he'd punted.

Bill was only 26
with his whole life before him
(he wondered what came after).
He was not strong on decorum.
Whiskey Bill was on his way.
'Whatever!' was his rallying cry.
(W.B. was an indifferentiast of the highest order).

And so he set off,
moving his feet for many a night
and barely a day.
Headed for the Belgian border,
armed with waffle-iron and tape-recorder,
with every step Bill would reconnoiter
and juggle his priorities until, at last,
nothing came first --
and everything was final.
Orders, he'd found,
were the last to know,
while always on the march,
while always on the go.

Soon it became evident:
there was no going back
and no going forward,
though the steps in between
were firm and untoward.
Still Bill's resolve never did dwindle,
never did wane, nor doubt did kindle,
as waffle after waffle did he
meticulously spindle.

Being a pirate of poetic kind,
possessed of handsome scabbard
and iambic mind,
Bill sought adventures
of the nautical kind, which, in Begium,
he found,
were hard to find.
Urban by nature,
Bill had no clue
how to navigate nature,
though he'd been to a zoo.
And was quite a collector
of stuffed kangaroos
and other marsupials
(all of which had died,
he'd been guaranteed,
of natural causes,
like scurvy and greed).

Gripping his sword
and reciting his creed,
Bill scaled the Not-Mountains of Belgium,
rappelling with rare surcease.
When pausing on a bluff,
he would snack
from a can of aerosol cheese,
sip elderberry wine
from a canteen with ease.
Thus fortified, Bill clambered along,
over moss-covered rocks, through armies of bees.
Soon Bill's thoughts turned melancholy
and he crooned a quiet song:

Something might happen
at some point,
something might happen
sometime soon.
But for now I'll just walk
by the light of this
really-not-at-all-reassuring moon.

Though a young man
with more sense than most,
just then Bill glimpsed a spectre
(also known as a ghost).
With a shiver and a lurch
Bill scurried to and fro,
watching the spectre watch him,
watching the spectre not go.

It seemed to Bill that the spectre was keening,
the way it hovered and sputtered,
the way it shook without meaning.
Bathed in a ghastly orange-green glow,
the spirit appeared more bemused than bemusing.
And Bill found what he felt
less unpleasant than ... confusing.

The spectre had a profile like the Mona Lisa
and emitted the sounds of a second-hand tuba.
As time went by, Bill felt less uneasy
In fact very soon he was feeling almost ... breezy.
As the spectre peered with eyes of green,
Bill decided it was mischievous, but not really mean.

And then all of a sudden the spectre spoke,
-- it wasn't reassuring or polite; it was more like a poke.
"They will tear you asunder!" shrilled the creature,
with near-Biblical demeanor.
She spake when she might have spoke,
and Bill found himself wishing
she had opened with a joke.

Just then a dark cloud rolled over the mountain,
and water sprang up underfoot
from some top-secret spring,
or wrong-way fountain.