that involve cocks and your mother

or fake phone numbers for a good time,

or a hastily spraypainted Libertad

on a wall in Santiago or Saoirse

in Belfast or the full car murals

gleaming with dramatic fades

of skyscrapers and cartoon figures

the unknown artist spraypainted

somewhere deep in the trainyard

as the subway rolls third rail

sparking from the Bronx or Chicago,

to travel unnamed and the people say look—

the art of the city, the art of the human

heart that needs no name to say I was here,

without tag or signature, not the famous

ones, no this is something else, a vandal

ridiculing Caesar, a shout

against the secret police, a simple face

drawn with a black marker, the sly grin

that stares at me from the back

of a seat on the downtown bus

and how with a simple flirtatious line

the artist made the right eye wink

as if telling me a secret, as the bus

rolls past the bodega where gang signs

signal turf, or the great murals

that rise off the sides

of closed factories, in this city

where the young gather

underneath bridges, and highway passes

to make characters shine, or the latrinalia

I read on the stall door

as I sat down to shit

at the music club that said “in life

and punk rock, there is no

toilet paper.”