We spent nights getting high, pipe smoke swirling in the brooding light of streetlamps.
Those of us who could painted coils of graffiti on walls, on trucks, on monkey bars.

At night the playgrounds are for teenagers to play, aided with drink and smoke.
It's the way cigarette butts get in the sandboxes, crushed glass glittering under swings.

Whether you drop a pill or are just that way, madness happens: creativity in concentrate.
All I know is my madness is placid, a tide rocked by the moon as if in a crib.

Some of us get stoned and watch movies; the others smoke and dream of planets,
silent giants, softly lashed by asteroid whips, calm as a rotating mobile.

As we walked the street, we saw a pair of sneakers hanging from a telephone wire under dull stars.
One by one my friends took off their shoes, laced them together, and launched them. "We can do without."

We had our thoughtful moments, the nights when curiosity outweighed boredom. Those were the times we climbed hills,
looked over the twinkling city as if studying a painting that shifted and swirled in rapture with grace.

My father, a morphologist, objected to the friends I had.
"You see," he often sighed, "one can learn a lot about a word from its synonyms."

Yet for all my exposure, I never learned how to read the tagging on walls of buses and bus stops.
They loop in whorls, more colorful than fingerprints, yet also coded with their secrets of identity.

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Copyright©2017-1999 by Rebecca R. Hammack

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