African-American History Month Special
Jean-Michel Basquiat, a creative,
born of Puerto-Rican and Haitian parents
in Brooklyn, New York.
I’ve seen you and your partner,
nights, maybe, days,
tagging epigrams on city walls
with the alias SAMO.
I’ve seen you in the dingy clubs,
spouting improvisational rhymes and raps.
Those were your Fab-5 Freddy days,
scratching clawing elbowing.
During your Warhol days,
you purged the symbols of your subconscious
and the inhabitants of your existence
onto the canvas.
Visceral and urgent gurgitations of kingly crowns, skulls, African masks,
self-portraits, boxing gloves and boxers, animal horns, hollow-eyed sockets,
knives, more bones, divergent smiles and similies
knitted together into a stew of color blocks,
reds, blues, yellows, browns, and black.
See the flailing figures and figures of speech
trapped in jagged and spikey prison cells.
For the gazers and gawkers and the critics, it’s all there:
the longings and gurglings of a spirit
restless in pursuit of fame and subsistence,
now and for always,
brutally and beautifully scarred onto the immortal canvas.
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