At some point, you realize
it is more than wanton destruction
or the need for an outlet.

There is art in it, purpose,
and messages as bold and secret
as those of the grandmasters

and you stop shaking your head
and you stop in the open-air museum
and try to understand

what lied beneath the visual rant,
People passing wonder at you standing there,
head cocked in thought,

“Silly man!”, they whisper between themselves,
“May as well understand God as this drivel.”
But they would be wrong.

God is easy. He leaves his messages in the open,
allowing us to complicated them
with prejudice and a need to control.

Art though, is hard. We lack the code
that lives inside the head of the artist
with the spray paint,

but the prejudices are just as strong.
Still, you try and in the trying,
the loud graffiti on the wall becomes yours,

at least a little bit.
And you become just a little more human
in the effort to understand.

Its eighteen months since her delivery
Now she is penning odes ostensibly
Crayons in both hands: she is standing tall
What Dada says? "No writing on the wall."

With great care baby writes her graffiti
Not much untouched by her audacity
He tries to compromise with a new book
but baby says, "Daa Daa"; with a stern look

He has to admit the walls are hers now
Filled with scribbles and a chromatic cow
Its her version of Van Gogh's Starry Night
without the stars; a novice oversight

She's more surreal than Salvador Dali
The writing's on my wall: Pure Graffiti

I set my sight far on China
abacus counting; without confusion
But they're mostly short sighted
and that's no delusion

Heard about the Hong Kong march
but didn't recall till I'd seen what I saw
So I did what I did, now I understood
what I could, with Confucius

Never take a pen to a pig
nor your litter to the swine
for one, H one N one
Can I get myself the Canadian kind?

Import... extort, not for the canola  
nor the coals down under
If I'm selling what I stole from selling Inuit
like the forty thieves and Ali's plunder

How many men can stand as tall
without writing Graffiti on the Great Wall
that they built, that's psychopathic
for the people, by the people, the Great Republic

We all friends in Earth's society
No reason to start quaking
The Society of Friends are friends
The Quakers aren't shaking

No Quaking in Rome?
Nor the Sistine Chapel?
Black smoke, White Hope
White smoke, Black Pope

Does this seem dope? Just wait,
White State, Black Faith
Black State, White Fate
The impossible a possibility and a dope bomb

Start with a Quake, make a Quaker
If its a shake, make a shaker
Where's his taker of notes
penned at the Apostolic Nunciature

He heard a friend tell a friend's friend
Its getting late; confess your faith
If you ain't straight, you'll be left by the gate
near the wall with the writing

No thunder nor lightning
while I AM walking and all
In the city of the Monk
Graffiti: Writing on the Wall

Inside this scaled down life
We move like goldfish
The pretence of an ocean
In four small rooms.
So many other lives swim
Within the same space
One upon another
Surrounded by the din
Of each other and the world
Passing by.


Is it any wonder
We have become insane
Looking for ways out
Expression through graffiti
Escape through drugs
Destroying the symmetry
Of our own environment
To mimic the bounty of nature
Destroying each other, for peace
And a chance to sleep alone.