Poet: Ashley “Arts” Hart, 18

This is Ashley Hart’s second year participating in Louder Than a Bomb. She is a senior at Curie High School and a member of Team Lyrical Revolution.



The Poem That Comes After Trial Accounts “Masters Graff”
Impractical/
Imperfect/
His hands moved/
Designing majestic murals upon his stone paper/
Shaking paint against the Chicago’s cold/
His hoodie stained with the colors of a new art piece/
He worked steadily/
His piece/
Paragon/
Untouchable/
He escapes only the inartistic/
Using colored metaphors to paint madness/
Without grafficks he’d be madness/
Protruding burgundy as his pleasure/
He stencils megatrons with bases onto brick canvases/
Staining permission walls with multicolored fat caps and lids/
He masters basicks/
Inserting music within his decos/
Extensive symbolism in every piece he spins through blaring headphones/
His typically flipped thoughts hop through streets where he writes to slam props/
He delves deep into a Graff packed haven/
It’s a shame that his paint burns through your names/
He lets the letters in his scriptures stain silently in true blue dancing from bus stops, to train cars/
Even replacing gang tattoos/
Scribing description through addiction/
Painting never felt so straight and narrow/
Yet stigmas sting the palms the spray cans in to show they’re fearful/
This night crawler in all black who’s habit is incurable/
Whose hands were meant to dance this craft of Graff into murals/
Whose existence is to instantly spew beauty onto bare walls/
When conformity lacks a love for him and shatters his past perfection with laws/
Pressing down his perfect hobby/
Smearing tears into his krylon/
Halting his business for an instant but unanimously he still bombs/
I think it’s tragic how a craft that started beautiful was twisted/
This Gifted kid whose gained a love for Graff are forcefully being shifted into infamy While the canister does his dance/
This man sprays his name for days with callusd varicoloured hands/
He gets/
Intimate with his artistry/
Scribing rights through metallic tongues/
They wait for him to quit and wish his masterpiece undone/
He breaks beats into his paintings/
Fine signatures staining steel/
Placeing emotions with his magic/
Laying out the way he feels/
This be his night job/
The touch of sin and mud/
He writes across glass windows/
Within the boundraries of the the sun/
His hands are beauty at its peak/
Blazing words across a page/
Permission wall anthropologies raining through for days/
He is the sandman on your pillow/
A marker wrapped in dreams/
Instant gratification/
The silouette of kings/