Que se explica si el se llama Bowie:
corazones de japon,
corazones de america,
gente importante,
solos los hombres,
solas las miujeres,
solito el camgbio el mundo,

solito el cambio,
su imagen
cambio su estilo de manejar su musica,

fue heraclito,
fue hombre,
fue alien,

las manos de exageradas visiones,
los dedos libros de Bolaño,
de Borges,
de Cortazar,

la imagen de su visage,
fue Paris,
fue Russia,
fue Japon…

fue Bowie,

la la la la lo

In sixth grade,
I wrote a letter to David Bowie
addressed to his New York home never knowing
a girl named Kamryn exists,
but I thought I was special enough
for a world-renowned rock star to reply
or care enough about some pre-teen angst

I shared with him how my grandma Pam
chose drugs over (I know now an addiction has many more complex layers)
getting to know her grandchildren or
to love her son, but then I remembered-
this is David ******* Bowie, he's lived life
with ******* in his bloodstream for thirty years prior

Maybe, I mentioned it all
because I wanted to feel special,
like the way, I think dying young
will create that for me. It's stupid
how I painfully so-identified as
"the girl with the mousy hair"
and the piano aiding an eloquent
discussion about the world's disarray
in which I selfishly identified as my own
"Life on Mars" always felt like a personal performance
just for me, but at twenty-one, it isn't just a song
and I still lay awake wondering if Mars and I
share a similarity, we want life to ebb
so distinctly within us both.

Two and a half weeks into this quarantine
Rainy days and
no poems
No words forthcoming
All quiet
I decide that perhaps
if I just put one
Word
In front of another
And keep on for a time
Words upon words
something will come?

At 8:30 every morning
A man passes
walking a Pomeranian mix
A joyful little dog
(I’d steal him in a heartbeat)
They walk
He twirling the leash round and round
The dog leaping higher and higher still.
They dance together eyes meeting
and smile as I know a dog can
and I remember
how I would dance with my last greyhound.
We would tango and box-step.
I always led.

These days the little
Pomeranian can’t get his attention
anymore
The leash doesn’t twirl above its head
He’s pulled along impatiently
There are no more smiles
Their eyes won’t meet
He’s slow to realize that he’s become a drudgery
I want to yell out the window
I see you
EVERY MORNING AROUND 8:30!
Where’s your joy gone buddy?
Don’t you know that’s all you’ve got?
You’re bumming me out for real
and your dog loves you!
Wake up! You fool wake up!

I think that now I’ll walk to Ralph’s
I have various thoughts while doing so
Children race their bikes passed me
as if they’re in an entirely other reality
altogether
and
maybe they are.
The wind blows through their hair
effortlessly
As if it couldn’t mine.

Front lawns offer up fields of dandelions
as if their orbs the most prized bounty
Freshly mown grass smells new and clean instead of putrid, rotting in the sunshine
The fulsome wafts of springtime’s
jasmine and osmanthus heaving with citrus and pepper evade me as I pass their blossoms
Yet on the rare occasion a fragrant rose pierces through the weft and hits a nostril
but I can’t tell which bloom.

The smooth talking
homeless girl
has finally covered up that
diabetic open sore on her left ankle
the size of a flattened crimson football
which is something,
although I can see that
she’s being told to move along as
she just can’t sit anywhere she pleases.

I’m counting every time I see the word “dead” along my way.

In the store the ladies that buy
their bottles of white wine in the afternoon
are starting earlier now
with supplies and deliveries
unsure
It’s one thirty and I see
Two bottles of Clos du Bois
And four Domaine St. Michelles
in the cart to my right
and nothing else
as they do.
I’m not going to ask her
about her dinner party.

While I stare at packages of coffee
A man pulls off his mask to sneeze into the air before him
And I say to the older man approaching
I don’t think that you’ll be going any farther
in that direction.
It was under my breath.
He didn’t hear me.
I have a mask on.
He turned his cart around and walked back
the way he came.

I have this urge to talk to everyone.
I have this relentless desire for ice cream.
I miss everything.
Nothing here
will satisfy anything
to do with me.
Can one survive a global catastrophe
with candy and magical thinking?

Older people
And by that
I mean really old people
Eye me suspiciously
Almost fearful
As if I myself alone
embody
the menacing contagion
and I guess I could.
Perhaps I do.
It’s hard to read emotions with these masks
But their eyes seem terribly unkind and
brows, furrowed
One stares at me hard
with beady anger and a ready insult
another will jump me in the checkout line
and with great solicitude
unwrap her money from
the white notebook paper
pulled from the manila envelope
Now re-folded with
rubber bands and string
And placed back
into her chest
She is so sweet to the cashier
with her black acrylic wig askew
that he seems quite shocked to hear
she cut in front of
fifteen people
without so much as a word.
Who cares really?

My first mask made me sneeze for four hours straight and made my nose burn like a hit of **** *******.
I’ve been handed a free mask by
a representative
from my local assemblyman
made of a softer material
I find that
it won’t stay up and fogs the base of my glasses.
I don’t think it’s working.
It reads
We’re All In This Together.

I still can’t breathe.

The doomed asthmatic
selling his single ciggies on the sidewalk
dies on Staten Island
from a policeman’s chokehold.
Eric Garner
In those desperate last moments
of
his
2014
despite his pleas and confusion
surely there before him appeared
although not quite the end that he’d envisioned or feared
what with steroid inhalers from the pharmacy
a crystalline moment
when he knew without a doubt that
he’d never take another gasp of air
like a bloated goldfish on its side
expressionless and saucer eyed
outside its bowl
What happened to his mind then?
What will happen to mine?

It has been said that
certain tribal kings
have brought before them
after battle
their most worthy enemy
in the process of imminent death
while they sit in numinous splendor
and wait for that perfect moment
to lean in close to the mouth
and inspire greedily
the purest
most sublime
expiration of their life force,
now a pristine delicacy of the infinite,
for themselves alone.

A reflection is shadow made of light.
I look at myself. “Who you trying to fight?“

You know he’s crooked cause his head is cocked.
It’s rebellion.
His past is in flames, he’s a hellion.
That’s why he don’t hear what they be tellin him.
He hears his own music.
He let’s it in, he grooves it.
It flows through his body when he moves it.
You can always be happy if you choose it.
Listen to the dope beats
and keep a couple close to your throne seat.
It’s emotion in wave form. There is no rawer art
or rarer reward. For if you truly listen
changes will start in the you-est you.

I was shocked too but I swear, it’s true.
All sorts of things will change you, if you let them.

Week after week,
life drops the weak,
All of this strife makes us reek-
of depression, The Great Depression?
More of a depression of the Greats...
It started with Bowie, all these phonies,
mourn for something- someone they weren't around,
to witness or experience...

This is ground control
I sneaked in to give you a call,
it’s been a while and I yet wonder
are you still floating ‘round your tin can?

Since you launched in sixty-nine
not much has changed on planet Earth,
though Voyager one has left the system
recording sounds of Interstellar Space.

Its batteries are running low
but then other probes are on their way
rest assure, they are not searching for you
you’ve been forgotten long ago.

Scientists still question whether
indeed there is life on Mars,
planning missions to get there
we’ll leave in fifteen years or so.

Some are drawing domes forsaking
tragedy, creatively painting our escape.
Mickey Mouse has packed his suitcase,
left Minnie waiting in a bar.

Modern telescopes point to discover
exoplanets not too far, just in case,
some residing habitable zones
orbiting nearby stars.

This is ground control
I hear footsteps in the corridor,
have to run will call you again
until then I’ll keep taking care,

of your Diamond Dogs.