Today a Thin White Giant Fell from Earth

My brain hurts like a warehouse, it has no room to spare.

I have David Bowie to thank for the very first time I waxed philosophical on the penis. At 10 I remember his shimmering codpiece as if it took up 2/3s of the screen. And maybe it did. It's been years since I watched Labyrinth. But this morning I woke up hungry for his peach and nothing else will do. I especially want the worm inside. His was the first force to awaken the dreaming worm of weirdness beneath all my sweet curvatures and juice. The first to offer graffiti'd hints that my pit might be something much more tricky.

My sophomore year of college youtube was still a novelty. Once I found him seducing Mick Jagger into shaking his ass and pressing fiery foreheads together, I watched the "Dancing in the Street" video at least 300 times that winter. I forced all of my friends to watch it too. It kept us warm. It doesn't matter that in the 90's they both took their passions back in respective interviews. Evidence for their overwritten queerness still exists. I still love him. I already miss him through my lack of forgiveness. I would still go down on his ego. Gladly.

The first time I heard "Space Oddity" I almost cried and then the key change saved me from folding in like my mother was prone to. Confident jerking guitar pulls brought oxygen back to the chest cavity his solemn space opera had thrust into vacuum. After that I never again remembered how to breathe normally. My lungs knew from then on, the dazzling strangeness of his universe.

 This morning I full-on sobbed before his hope came in to save me. (My mother would be proud). 
"Tell my wife I love her very much."
"It's time to leave the capsule if you dare."
He dared and dared and dared. Without him I'd never have understood how to accomplish the necessary risk of leaving my capsule.

He, mystical glittery beast, unweaving himself each musical season, and saying "Yes" to every possible version of himself – He, sex on two milky-thin matchsticks, shattered the panicky distance between us and alien. He put a shine on the things my adolescence feared touching: Sex, Loss, & Otherness. In many ways I see his career as a 50-year long public adolescence. Now that he's gone the way only his space ship knows to go; now that his bright flare of earthly puberty has ended, and the rest of humanity remains, I fear we'll find ourselves far too grown up. So let's remember his hair throwing (caution to the wind) and tenor-into-baritone trajectory as we recall our very first tweenage desires, with ache and a sharp-but-tender recklessness.

My Commute (a prose poem for my bike)

This is how I get to and from work every day (and also anywhere else I need to get to). I'm pretty sure I have the best commute ever.

Even after 8 hours of anxious rolling to and fro, the soles of my feet are overjoyed to be gripped and my sneakers grin at being bitten into by the pedal's teeth. For the first few blocks my palms and fingers squeeze hard to the handlebars. As if I could somehow milk relief from the yellow leather bar tape (last month's big spend). But less than a mile of my hip socket and knees churning, my spine collects enough courage to straighten up. Little by little until my hands let go and allow themselves to be dragged heavily to my sides, as roll roll roll my shoulders to the music I pinned under my helmet straps and into one ear.

Between the road cracks I dance or even flap my arms like some goofy fucking bird, or one of those pre-flight humans who knew nothing about aeronautical engineering. There is something so freeing about being on a bike. My fixie delivers to me a false and deliciously flattering sense of control. As I turn my hips and inner thighs into a steering wheel and belt out Lady Gaga, I do not fear onlookers. I welcome their gawking, because right now I am awesome-- and not in the 90's Tony Hawk sort of way. A classic sense of awe streams through my biking bones. And I become bold. Consider proposing a drag race with one of the cars. I envision winning and riding off with the stunned motorist's girlfriend bouncing on my handlebars; her heart clearly the wager of the race he was foolish enough to agree to.

I flirt with every pair of eyes I can catch. It takes serious effort to unpurse my lips from the wolf whistling position. Instead I shake my dance more vigorous. Grooving on my bike, I am sex on wheels. And in this state of churning catharsis I am freed. I am dangerous. I trickle my calculated risk through red lights and past the stilled and grumbling chagrin of jealous drivers.

I am naive enough that I do, for a few blocks, actually feel immortal, that if anything came close to hurting me and Queen Bee we'd just glide free from the damn pavement. Like I had a fucking alien hiding under a blanket in my front basket or something. Up on my revolving perch, this thing, this cycle combining with my body is stronger and surer than any drug I have ever taken. My lungs open like wings waiting for action and I am free as the air that moves through them.