Thanks David Bowie

…for giving me permission to become a scary monster.

Sigh Like Twig the Wonder Kid

A party tonight with real boys / who needs trouble
Better the problems of representing shadow
Electric snap of static when fingers touch vinyl then
the amplified hush as needle meets its groove
Better to ponder freakishness / whether
the green eye wants what the brown foresees / His tenor
founders on the bridge and she can’t breathe,
as if she’s in love / or gazing in the mirror

Meanwhile she fixes Bowie’s sheen in oils
learning his rouged mouth’s quirks / Not the glam
rock waif who streaked a lightning bolt across
his face / not the corn-pale padded suit of cynical
1983 / but Changes Two
the wet look / Nothing set / nothing dry
Ruffled bedspread / sting of turpentine.
Plaid uniform skirt / her paint-swirled smock
She mixes a bruised hue to smudge around
his eye as cadmium washes from the sky

She applies so little pigment the fibers
of the canvas show / A famished child
a reckless thing / she knows how costumes sink
into the skin / That voice is forever / Yet she claws
up fishnets / finds her cobalt ankle-boots
An ink-and-mustard mini / some Dippity-Doo
Ground Control could learn a thing or two

From Radioland, Barrow Street Press, 2015. The poem was first published in Turbine. The slash marks came later, when I was thinking about punctuation in the book–they seemed a good way to encapsulate the either/ or cruxes of adolescence. Did I have a crush on Bowie, or did I want to be him? I still don’t know, but when I started writing poems I was following his lead, tracking down his every literary reference, studying how he put lines together. I’m sad about today’s news but also just really grateful. He opened strange doors that we’d never close again.

I did paint countless album covers in oils when I was a teenager; here are two, from my Virginia attic. Wish I still had the cobalt ankle boots.