Graffiti

Kitty Goes Kommando and the Goldman Rats — Phooey!

That blue scaffolding holds up the sky. Who did we think

we were padlocking in, or out? Give me that huge

looping black script no one can read, a secret glyph,

and just where someone has smashed the window, Jesus

the Way the Truth the Life and a dented aluminum frame.

He bent down, we know, and wrote something illegible on the ground.

A toothy black-and-white dinosaur gapes. I like the crack

in this wall of monsters where skylines topple and ogres

twiddle train tracks in their claws like pipe cleaners.

Down the long, semi-abandoned street in Queens

calligraphy gallops toward the shop displaying,

like guitar strings, seven different iron rods

for gates. Hole in the wall, rose sound-hole,

ribbed sounding board — always from fissures and gaps

melody strains as trains thunderclank across

the girdered overpass, a siren keens, and a solitary man

ambles past amputated acacias fisting out with leaves.