POEM: TAG

Tag

There! There!

Mark your name now by the stair.

On the wall your human essence;

in the wood is carved your presence—

the commuting of a sentence

on the stairwell wall.

     A bit of silliness I felt was somehow justified as belonging on this blog. The cartoon or silly scrawl, or whatever it is was done after 911, and it reminded me of graffiti. The poem may have been written when I was at university, though I am not sure. I just ran across this as I was breaking into the mausoleum for some old bones, and I dug up this chalky bit. And I thought about my time at university when I wrote a piece of graffiti at the bottom of a stairwell in one of the university residences, going as far down as I could crawl under the descending stairs. It read: "Midget Power!" (I was majoring in Irony at the time.) I wonder if it’s still there. I can also recall, later on, writing “This was a nice room” above the headboard of my bed in the wood of the built-in shelves of my room at university, where the cleaning staff would likely overlook it. The next semester, some girl who got my room (it was a co-ed floor—very progressive, you-know, and wink-wink for the times!) mentioned it to me, and we laughed and shared the joke. 

Also, a piece of graffiti written in a tunnel that ran from my residence to the main student building is etched into my brain. It became stuck there as I traversed the tunnel in various states of sobriety, pub-crawling (and sometimes just plain crawling) my way to a degree. The tunnel was long and quite necessary in the winter. If you’ve ever seen pictures of Russian gulags, that’s what the university I went to during the last ice age was like in the winter months: it was about the bleakest and most f@#kingly depressing place on earth! Three out of four seasons it was great, but winter was "please, just shoot-me!" season. The graffiti went something like:

Watch ‘em grow,

Chew them toes.

See how them arctic snows blows! 

    

Yep. That just about says it all....

     Recently, I read an article about the world’s most famous graffiti-artist, Banksy, whose painting of one of his street works sold at auction for something like a million bucks. It apparently had a device in the frame that shredded the painting just after it was sold. There’s a photograph of stunned bidders at the London auction house of Sotheby’s staring in disbelief as Girl With Balloon came out the bottom of the frame in ribbons. Fake news? Quite possibly--the photo looked a bit contrived. Who knows? I don’t really care. Nevertheless, Bansky sure has a lot of cheek! I know there’s irony in there somewhere--a lot! But these days, it seems everything is awash in that well-honed literary device, from Presidents without the brains of a Poptart, to a Pope who skates around pedophiles like an ice follies star, so that pointing any more out would be like trying to shill stones in the Stone Age!  

Anyway, for a lot less than a million bucks I’m willing to shred any and all graffiti I’ve ever done over the years. And how! Art doesn’t last forever, you know. But does anything, you ask? Our world, in a few billion years or so will be a nothing more than a pile of star ash (barring any nasty business in the meantime with extinction-level comets or 'oopsie' nuclear exchanges.) So what gets left behind will go away in the end. Somewhere. Or our writings, our artifacts, our structures and places will become so different, or we become so different, that we can’t make sense of them, or understand what they mean anymore. Eventually, we lose touch with what we leave behind; that’s just the way of it. And for those who chance upon what we leave behind, they will only see only what they can understand. And that, too, is how things are meant to be.

Tag suggests that whatever we touch, and whoever and however we touch, takes something away from us—some part of our essential ourselves, our being. In touching, in leaving behind something, there is a kind of forgiveness. For what exactly, I’m not sure. But it’s there, and it’s real. And I say this without a trace of irony....

criminal

like a thumbprint

on a wall

not yet dusted

for prints,

i’m here,

your treasure

in my arms. 

I fell into the dirty hole of nostalgia and found this near the bottom, covered in the dirt and litter of half a lifetime. "criminal" was written in the 2000s sometime, but the photo is of York University's main student building as seen from the bottom of a rather depressing set of stairs. The architecture is of the 1960s' "Brutalist" form, and I think the description is an apt one. Concrete  and brutal functions describes the place to a tee, at least physically, back then. [WARNING: If you stare too long at the photo, the photo starts to stare back! Ed.] I have no idea what it's like now; hopefully it's more human-friendly.  For me, this building and its designer belong in a gulag! The photo was one I had attached (digitally) to the "Tag" poem. The stairwell is not the one I 'tagged' and mentioned above. 

As far as the poem, "criminal", goes, it’s concerned with relationships, and the feeling of being invisible or unnoticed; when you feel undetectable to your partner (or a more technical term I like to use—your "main squeeze!"). Perhaps this feeling indicates that the relationship is about to end, or that there will be some sort of change. I like the fact that the speaker tells the listener that their "treasure" (whatever it is) is something the speaker thinks is important enough to hold on to, even if they feel criminal doing so. It's unclear whether the speaker addresses his or her listener directly. (It's almost like they're a 'sticky' note' on the wall, waiting to be read.)  

I assume the thumbprint is mine. Guilty, as always.

Cheers

Martian Selfie c. 2019