VICIM

Near, where I live, is a strip mall.
Behind the strip mall,
near the dumpsters overflowing with trash
and garbage, is a
thicket.
In this thicket, the homeless go to sleep
and drink and do drugs.

In this thicket is a tree.
Someone has painted
the letters VICIM
on the tree trunk.
Vertically.
Each time I walk by,
I wonder what those
letters could stand for.

One day, I decided to
do a Google search.
VICIM is a city in Poland.
VICIM stands for-----
Virtual
Institute for
Chemometrics and
Industrial
Metrology
I have no idea
what that means.
VICIM is also a company
that sells innovative
mouldings.
There's a Portuguese
blogger named
VICIM.
There's a Romanian
company named VICIM
International SRL.
I have no idea what
they do.
I don't speak Romanian.

Then---I started to
think about it differently.
What if...
the person who wrote
those letters...
What if they merely
misspelled--- VICTIM...?