On a toilet wall the graffiti’s bleak—
‘FUCK A STRANGER TONIGHT’
Reads a message not there last week.
Other slogans, names and boasts
Seem jaded compared with this
Advice scrawled by Anonymous.
But the graffiti evokes an image of the crowd,
The lost, androgynous animal
That does not die but daily swells,
That longs for kindness then reveals
A different nature on toilet walls.
Yet let’s give its authors credit enough
To understand how the night
Breeds in its drunken scribblers
Things wrongly written that are right.