Masterpieces nailed to the sides of train cars
As they pass it becomes a flipbook
Made of names so grotesquely caricatured
(down to every last tittle and tisten)
They would become beauty through definitions
Written themselves.
It is scrawled onto napkins
Hoisted over the neon city
Crudely lined and curved into cardboard signs
Lofted between vagrant fingers that hadn’t touched a green thing in years.
Safety in the colors
Born from the rust of the river which runs when we walk
And fermented through years of gunfire
Which coincidentally spell out our names between the holes
And deteriorate when obscured by some passing train cars
That I cannot help but to stop and admire.
This flipbook of broken law and clever rebellion
In its own right, a masterpiece in pieces
In its terrible condemnation, erased
And the artist dies again.