They Put the Graffiti On | Matthew James Babcock
they take the graffiti off
around here, when every
autumn sky rusts at dusk
and every blue prelude
of swollen moon
brings symphonic gusts
of spring sunrise and stricken
willows swaying as if
kicked about in hurricanes
where the same untended
riverside walkway ends
near the standing shell
of a refurbished building
that was a soft yogurt shack,
was a cheap burger joint,
is now a Hawaiian grill.
The trouble with surfaces
is another surface surges
beneath the first, so no
crust of carbonized pain
contains the luminous
lava of overflowing
laughter, like restraint damming
urge. Ever the slow march,
ever the upward dermal
thrust of layer purging layer,
as no obscene slogan
in hot pink paint, swerving
like the sexy hieroglyphics
of the future across
the steel footbridge arch,
escapes the disc grinder
scouring its temporary face
to a spinning shower
of orange sparks that hiss
into the river still throbbing
like a vandal’s vein.
Before the palimpsest heart,
before onionskin lung,
before busted plumbing
stained deranged watercolors
on drywall backstage
or translucent dandelion
leaves glowed in
black asphalt ruptures
like the savage signatures
of mad street mages,
where did the angry
and disillusioned scrawl
their fluorescent green rage?
On what insubstantial
page of fresh black primer
in refinished space?
Lash quickly, scribes and taggers.
Deface and be replaced.
No phase is more than erasure,
no displacement less than trace.
Bonus audio of Matthew reading his poem…
about the author:
Matthew James Babcock is the author of Four Tales of Troubled Love (fiction), Heterodoxologies (nonfiction), Points of Reference (poetry), Strange Terrain (poetry), Hidden Motion (poetry), and Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis (criticism). Awards: Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, AML Poetry Award, Next Generation Indie Book Award for Short Fiction, and Press 53’s Open Awards Anthology Prize for his novella, “He Wanted to be a Cartoonist for The New Yorker.” Served as Arthur Dolsen Visiting Writer at Idaho State University (2022). Fiction collection, Future Perfect, awarded the Forsberg Fiction Prize (Avalon Park Press, forthcoming 2026).