Our bookstore has owned and operated a warehouse in Wilkinsburg since 2000. Over the years, we've watched a series of graffiti tags appear on the building's rear garage door.

Our initial anger transformed into resignation, followed easily by the blissful, filtered vision of denial. Well, easily for me -- I usually work in my home office while our dependable employees are on the front lines of retail and e-commerce. The people on our staff are in various stages of advanced education; nearly all are involved in the local music and literary scenes.

Last summer, John, my husband and co-owner of the business, unearthed cans of brown and pink paint. He asked our youngest employee, Ed Steck, to paint the warehouse garage door in any way he pleased. Ed's only mission: Remove the graffiti tags.

The result was a brown door -- with an Arthur Rimbaud poem, "Departure," painted in pink letters.

The garage door miraculously became, and remained, tag-free.

You can draw your own conclusions from the experiment. Mine is that dead, gay, decadent 19th-century French poets rule the streets. Over the past year John and our colleagues would routinely see a person standing in front of the door, squinting as they read the garage-door Rimbaud.

Just last week, however, Monsieur Rimbaud's work was complemented by a small white tag ("Spod").

We're not sure if the novelty has worn off or if Ed needs to come up with a new poem. Either way, we'll supply the paint.