animation

in the flickering dark 
outside the subway car window 
a piece of graffiti frolicked. 
an image animated, frame by frame:
a purple body against a white background,
springy legs, rubber ball head, pulsating creature 
the drawing danced outside our car for several
seconds, then receded into long hollow of the tunnels.

i have spent the last few days
imagining the kind of person who would
make a piece like that, climbing down 
into the subway's damp mouth,
a backpack full of color, deciding
to make a film reel out of the rushing trains.
listening to their approach, hiding
in between each line made on stone.

i think of my uncle taking a sticky note book 
and showing my how to draw 
a little rubber ball at the bottom
of each yellow square so that it would bounce
when you flipped through the whole pad.
we bought dozens of notepads,
repeating the same little animation game,
all the while thinking, 
look we can make drawings alive. 

then of course there's all those movies,
the ones where people drew every single frame, 
i see all the hands filling in cinderella's dresses
over and over, blue and blue and blue 
and all the hands making birds to flit 
around snow white.

are there hands inside me like that?
making me body move like i do?
maybe a single being sneaks down into 
the night's damp hull to animate me, me: a purple man,
flickering out a subway window, dancing,
for fractions of a second