victim to his own imagination , michael tomatoes was a world of obtuse angles and acute bends , twists and vistas in his sensory tree-scape he peopled with chimeras and animated using anything from somnolent old ladies in the park ( the fungal excretions of sodden wooden benches , decades of old lady sweat having warped their pithy dna ) to blurred sepulchral visages glimpsed through the windows of passing ghost trains ; these last common enough , as locomotives and their carriages often whistled past his toes in the most unlikely places .