Lapse

Graffiti artists, known as writers, are often misunderstood by society.
Eden Magazine

The footbridge was skinned in graffiti – slogans, threats,
declarations of love, swastikas. Grek. Kost. Lapse.

I’d assumed lapse was a tag, a nom de plume or guerre, but
as the morning drags itself towards noon the word

has surfaced and resurfaced: lapse, lapse, lapse. Noun
or verb? Am I instructed? Warned? By lunchtime

I wonder if it’s even word at all, perhaps the writer
just sprayed shapes that look like L A P S E by fluke.

And by mid-afternoon it’s drained of sense, a dazed
semantic husk, so that as I cross the bridge again

I whisper it to myself as virgin sound, unsaid till now:
brute air lip-shaped, a world in a kind of freefall.

Martin Mooney is the author of four collections – Grub (1993), Rasputin and his Children (2000), Blue Lamp Disco (2003) and The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (2011). A New and Selected is due from Greenwich Exchange later in 2026