poetry Graffiti

Colorado poet Josh Lefkowitz reads the writing on the wall, asking what it means.

Josh Lefkowitz Rattle
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Graffiti

By Josh Lefkowitz

 

35,400 years ago, in a cave on Sulawesi –

fourth-largest Indonesian island –

someone painted a pig on the wall.

It’s been with us since the beginning –

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this impulse to create, to say:

We lived; we observed along the way.

They probably ate the pig, too.

History’s first Instagram post!

Look at this thing I’m about to eat!

All this was on my mind last night,

standing at a urinal in a VFW hall,

in a town – and a life – I’m just passing through.

Someone had marked these walls as well,

a celebration of the human spirit:

“Titty,” it said. And then “Skunk.”

Constantly seeking connections and patterns,

I bounced the nouns like blue rubber balls

in the handball court inside my skull.

Well, both excrete, albeit one to nourish,

one to defend. And in this spirit of defense

I returned to the place where I was.

Perhaps the words were a veteran’s reminder

of honorable service. After all, in a sea of softness,

someone needs to protect the burrow.

Although – thanks to curiosity, and the internet –

I’m learning now skunks can be domesticated as pets,

while we all know an innocent titty might harbor Stage 4.

But this is nonsense – an attempt to find meaning

in a world fueled by chaos. I zipped up, claimed my spot

at the bar, and continued to not ask any probing questions

of the man to my left, who, I’d been informed,

had served as a Vietnam medic, and fifty years later

still wore the war. He, more than me or most,

must understand the utter ridiculousness of this

whole human experiment, a riddle best left raveled.

There is no adequate explanation—

why the bullets or cancers found homes in our friends

and not us. Why we are here while others are not.

Thoughts without answers, 35,400 years old and counting.

All we can do is graffiti our luck we’re alive.

We paint pigs on walls to remind us. We pray.

We say “Grace.” We say “Titty.” We say “Skunk.”

Josh Lefkowitz was born and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, and received an Avery Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, Washington Square Review, Electric Literature, New Poetry from the Midwest 2019, Painted Bride Quarterly, and many other places. After seventeen years of living in NYC, he recently relocated to Boulder, Colorado.