Baby-Faced Anarchist

But if a kid's worth could be measured in miles,

spit through the engine across the threshold,

most of us couldn’t break the gate—

Our cocooned gloom grown in blankets—

Our fake hatching spoon-fed by the sun—

Our humanity spreading wings when we came of age

running from a rain cloud.

So from the underside we’d crawl and bite

with heightened taste by pregnant nights.

Born of short sight and no man’s weight,

we'd sink our teeth in a reckless meal of innocence

with a combat zeal and learn to deal

with our tainted souls of healthy bones

made someone’s tender feast.

But not so him—his bike was by the blockade

on the escape route where he jumped the barbs

and thorns and swords of damning blaze.

He braved all to rid the fill by will of temperament—

Just a boy giving up his toys on the pavement—

A refugee of Astroturf, a migrant exile of asphalt

running from a fear of culture.

So by miles down a highway patch he rested

so prodigal like a mechanic’s son to test

the air by nature’s stone relief—

My friend, he earned his weight in gold on foot

to get out beyond these basement bricks

if just to deface the fenced-in myths of truth in their

baseless belief in childhood.

My hero was an artist beating heart in crutches,

spray painting with a cracking can

and thumb sucking behind a filtered eye—

A frayed ego on the fringe by day who drew lines

at night by flashlight—never sleeping,

never yawning, always black and blue by morning,

a tragedy like us kids grown in shade—

Who all had eyes that burned when closed

and stung when forced to open

to the landscape not of lies—

But he woke one day to a world no different

than the one he’d shut his to—a dim reminder

of what silence can do—and he could no more

allow his hands from turning too.

So he drove a message home by burning flags,

a revenge sent to no one—the rule by rags—

a curse to the history after him

locked away in the deposits of his logic.

And so with a lit match sitting on his bony fingers

he set his worth in arson instead

and then surrendered—

And I wanted to be just like him,

my idol with idle hands. 

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--Poems from the Sprawl