Keith Haring (d. 1990), by Melissa Tuckman

Keith Haring (d. 1990)
 
A crucifix burlesqued: two bodies
intersecting where they shouldn't. Primal
 
compulsion to distort, by scarring,
tarps and concrete. Strokes, effluent tracings
 
wowing you with motion. Sickened
by the televangelists, ambivalent
 
Jesus-freak or Satanist, he
measured heavens with his brush, retorquing
 
scripture and a few choice myths.
His pregnant women danced. His Ten Commandments
 
bore no labels—though you guessed
the head with brain replaced by tennis rackets,
 
houses, cars, and (here, most prescient)
personal computers warned against
 
bad acquisitions, wrongful clutter,
tech idolatry. Where the brain had gone
 
was everywhere, its sulci crawling
over church exteriors, on walls
 
enclosing public pools and splitting
cities. High and low. He cerebellumed
 
half the northern hemisphere
before the fall. . . He never drafted, letting
 
lines escape and drip, continuous
to the final year, when all the erstwhile
 
angels, devils, serpents, boogieing
penetrants, and Three-Mile-Island babies
 
fused, abstracted, in a maze
with no dead ends, a mess of figures sharing
 
limbs, a deviant humanism
broiling on a canvas left unfinished.

Melissa Tuckman

Melissa Tuckman teaches in the English Department at Rowan University. She lives in Philadelphia.