This a poem I wrote one year ago, on the day David Bowie passed away. As a young queer woman, growing up with Bowie meant feeling seen and understood. There was a kitchsy, overdramatic, drag-esque quality to his work that made me feel safe and at home. This poem is a memorial to Bowie, and the impact he had on music, art, and queer youth.
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We’re nearly naked
When we get the news
Clasping at the pages
Like earnest children
The day after Christmas Morning
When mother takes the paper
And the ribbon out
With the carcass and the picked over
Tins of mashed potato
Cranberry sauce—
A memory so vivid you could just
Lie down on the shag rug
Stretch out on the three season porch
Take a nap—
But this is New York City
And that was a long time ago.
Now it’s just ashtrays and bird shit
Running for the train with the paper
Crumpled in your fist
It could have been a candy bar
In a past life
A good life
In Delaware or, somewhere like it
With a poster on a panel wall
Is there Life on Mars?
You think you kissed there, once
On a twin bed with four posts
You and a friend—a girl, a little
Experiment that wasn’t an experiment
So much as an indication
Of something else
Something political, or radical, or artistic
Something suburban and raw
Before the corner stores
And loose cigarettes, bodega cats
Manic street preachers with tins
Full of nickels
And androgynes with hair
As tall as the 104 tower
Licking their chops
With blood on their lips
And see through panties
Moving in slow-motion
Through the empty dancehalls
Wearing their silence so thick
You could frost it, Eat it.
When it was Greased Lightning
And wool socks, you maybe loved him
Them, her, it—everything so big and so small
And now, in your Brooklyn Bedroom
Nearly naked, the rattle of something lost
Pierces your ear like a pin
So vivid you could just
Lie down in it, come into your hand
Young and dumb and full of Mars bars
Singing intp the cusp of an ear
‘Let the children lose it,
Let the children use it.’
That was true Rock n’ Roll, after all—
That was the love of a lifetime
