Graffiti On Riverside Road

By Elsiewhere. under the overpass, near the tracks, by an oil-rainbowed, murky stream
are stories written and left behind by people who come here at night.

It’s daytime, nobody’s here, graffiti and girders upholding the bridge, rushed
traffic nearby, overhead, it’s muffled, you feel it, it’s loud, you can’t hear
yourself breathe, breaths suddenly shallow. someone has dropped a needle
on the foot-smooth dirt, and the air’s all rot: mouldering jackets and socks,
soaked bags, bottles and piss, animal shit, all manner of unnameable things.
words on the walls, faces, dark figures, even the dollar signs would blind an eye
in a less dim light; the colours are brilliant! carts tossed, like cadavers,
sideways in water, not bloated, but drowned and exposed, wheeled bodies
rusty and mucked with mud thick as the paint messaging walls with bling
bling. out to kill. fight me/ goofs deserve this. jews. niggers. cunt. words
covering words, the catman/ ain’t no/ thing. faint random letters, upper
and lower case, rising to warp another’s intention. RIP Dave. trace the snake
of red X’s ascending a rain-stain’s edge, follow the stain-stairway up up
into the rafters, beyond how high r u, then trace the tracks running the ground
’round the bend, where no one can see this, though it’s not very far. see,
there, the homeless men newly returned to their happy tree home manured
in June by anonymous staff. what’s new isn’t new; it’s as old as what was
and might never be; the fledgling aged quickly, too. It’s an issue of health;
it’s a hazard, said mayor, caught in a camera’s eye, in the news of another
public dismantling. Masked staff suited up for chemical war; it is, after all
city-owned lawn, but “treat the men with respect, this camp is their home.”
trucks loaded, home-owners (like loosed feathers breezed back to culled flock), belongings, settled anew in former, detoxified, camp. but this isn’t that story
(or is it?) here, where traffic hums back and forth, over and over, underneath
bridge, day and night, slowed yet not stopping, you behind brambles and
weeds, reading graffiti you’d looked for, now stumbled across, strolling
in Abbotsford.