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