LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: david bowie

  • I’m floating in a most peculiar way

    I’m floating in a most peculiar way

    Book launch days bring a weird energy. That combined with the planetary riffs in Poetry’s Possible Worlds has Bowie’s “Space Oddity” looping in my head, which is a pretty good soundtrack, really. Not that I’ve become untethered like Major Tom, but yesterday was full of “Big Bang Day” social media tweets, pre-party anxiety, and a […]

  • My brain hurt like a warehouse

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that middle-aged women sleep poorly. Hormones, hot-flashes–pandemic and political ugliness are just icing on the cake, really. From what I can see, middle-aged women, although they don’t seem like an envied or celebrated category of human, do a LOT, and it weighs on their brains. They pile myriad many […]

  • 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 […]

  • Future tense

    My father checked himself into the VA Medical Center in Philadelphia a few weeks ago and it’s not clear when or if he’ll be able to leave again. He’s been managing congestive heart failure for a while. Now he needs surgery for a leaky valve and just isn’t well enough to undergo it. Every time […]

  • Conversations and mixtapes

    Around the time I started reading Ginsberg and Keats, enraptured by anaphora and alliteration, I was also spending all my babysitting dollars on record albums by David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop—and when the money ran out, checking beat-up Janis Joplin LPs out of our town’s tiny cedar-shake library, a repurposed chapel. All this […]