Dedicated to the forgotten graffiti artists of New York and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and early 1970s who started it all before there were Kings.

I guess the one thing I never understood was that they'd never have a name until the walls screamed their names back - some bold demand, some shouted truth: "I'll talk. You read!"

They wanted to burn it all.
Wipe it out.
Gasoline it

- spray hiss after the cap twist,

kylon drips, the letters stack -

and impulse and angst-driven lust for freedom

impelled them to ignite it,
petrify it all in ink,
decapitate it in aerosol.
Baptize it all,
annihilate it.

Illuminate it to their aesthetic spell.
Slay it in a new kind of urban cosmos

of streak-lined, serpentine beat.

City alchemists -

who turned with the rush of a can,

the grey of a tired wall

into the gold of wildstyle alphabets.

New language, spray damage,

street script, walls ravaged -

youth-driven, new dialect,

a testament scrawled to a city's architect.

Maul it all,

gut it,
and murder it all.

- The alternative was their madness -

Facades or moving steel ripe for the marking,

districts and tracts for the virgin taking
they felt their birthright
to brag a name or

scream it in crime,
script it like a child’s birthday cake,
to the eyes of the rich and the poor
in cursive that howled,
that resurrected a city in color

and made her a vibrant Lazarus.

Hallmark that could only rise
from the weary pulse of streets
that passed on promises
well before the news and a new style
spread and adorned
itself across an ocean
and Europe was slain.

Before the privileged
and the savvy came and
played Bach to the graffiti shock
in galleries and commissions
clinked to Chardonnay -
before Kings were crowned.