Sid was Here

So were Skoz and Estelle, busy scratching their itch.

Look what they’ve done to looking.  Made a spectacle 

of it, a head-spin, a tumbling tub of tag lettering.  

Trash, surely, no ‘plainchant for the damned’, 

no ‘counter to derelict concrete geometrics’, no ‘dark 

poetry of addiction and malediction’, 

no ‘plausible antidote to the ad-maker’s smooth  

consumptive sell’?  O, even if critics class them as ‘idle 

wasters’, dismiss their works as trifling or slipshod  

by comparison, say, with exalted animal images 

that spellbind the walls of Altamira and Lascaux, I suspect 

Sid was there, too, picking a way through 

the long continuum, with Skoz and Estelle gabbing  

at his either elbow, trying to shock the world –

or their own existence – out of tediousness by using

such pigments as they could lay hands on, such slogans

as occurred to them, with what passed

for the moment’s equivalent of a cause or a spray-can.