Hunger

By Landon Wittmer

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Graffiti is a powerful thing—

Always sincere,

Always blunt,

Always overdue.

Too late for the builder

who intended a pure structure.

Too late for the graffitist

who writes in the eleventh hour.

Too late for everyone who never read the writing on the wall.

Too late for everyone but the janitor.

The janitor, the street cleaner:

They hold the cards.

They know Bloods and Crips, Jets and Sharks,

which roads lead to Rome and which to the ring,

who robbed who and who died for it.

They follow the painted shadows of broken bonds.

The janitor has seen the written and painted imprints of a defunct world.

Occasionally, he has seen it in action.

He doesn’t join in, but while he scrubs, he sees many things:

A trail of blood.

Broken glass.

Excrement.

An empty gun.

Men and women with clouds in their eyes pissing in the weeds.

More than anything else, the janitor sees the Shivering

on street corners, in parking lots,

cupping water from glassy rivers.

He learned that they shiver not from the cold,

but from their stomachs—no coal to grind. They drink, but never eat.

One night, a janitor made his rounds,

finding eternal text in red paint. It read,

WE’RE HUNGRY.

It rained then, and smeared the wall,

as if nature was hiding its first glitch:

The only constant in a man is his hunger.