Poets on walls. So nice to have them come out of the pages and present themselves as larger than life. Even as graffiti.

Neruda. “It  happens that I am tired of being a man.” The first line of “Walking Around,” one of my favorite poems. “Just the same it would be delicious/to scare a notary with a cut lily/or knock a nun stone dead with one blow of an ear./It would be beautiful/to go through the streets with a green knife/shouting until I died of cold.” Here Pablo sports a flower at his ear.

Byron.

“She walks in beauty, like the night /Of cloudless climes and starry skies; 
/And all that’s best of dark and bright 
/Meet in her aspect and her eyes…” Byron wrote these lines in 1814, stunned by the sight of his ravishing cousin, the Lady Wilmot Horton, at a party in mourning dress.

And Maya Angelou.

Life doesn’t frighten me at all.

Not at all.

Not at all.

And I would like to add my humble contribution. Back in 1985 when I got my MFA at Columbia, the poetry collection I wrote as a thesis had the title “So Unconscious Desire.” Inspired by a perfect graffito that I saw sprayed in orange and green on a boarded up storefront on 19th Street between 2nd and 3rd, long erased except in my mind’s eye. I think I’d like to go paint that again on a rock somewhere.