Ziggy
        I don't know where I'm going from here but I promise it won't be boring.—David Bowie

I thought of you today
from the comer of the classroom
near the terrarium tank
where a Chilean rose-haired tarantula hides
in her hollowed-out log.
My students were reading poems
and I was feeling a little sick
with a cough I can't quite shake.
I'd worn my T-shirt from London
that carries your face etched in shadow,
you who radiate life now
from the Valley of Death. Stretched
across my chest in gray poly-cotton blend,
your one weird eye resting
in the cusp between my cleavage,
touching my heart there,
I could rise above the aftertaste,
the orange medicinal syrup
that kept me dancing for the kids
whose hatched plots and wild songs
you would definitely dig.
Diamond Dog. Black Labrador
eating coal from the Grimmest tales
only to vomit back roses,
you've taught us to dwell in
the dimmest caves inside
and drift there alone, lushest stars
of our own unknowing. Queen Bitch,
oh you Spider from Mars
in your glitter boots and elevator legs,
silver twigs, two ghosts aflame
singing us to there and the cratered beyond.
What can you say to a svelte man-cat
decked out in rainbow suits
and rugged hairdos, studded chaps,
and violet Stratocasters, neon keyboards
on cosmic pedestals, supernatural
swagger of feminine divine,
the hero who launched our world?
They've found five asters
in the shape of a constellation
that resembles lightning,
a zagging bolt in the sky
swerving toward Virgo and Libra,
and named it after you, Ziggy,
and if we step outside
after midnight
when sleep makes ashes of our eyes
and the heavens gleam darkest,
astronomers say
for years to come—lucky us
—we might just see it.

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Copyright © 2018 Michelle Bitting All rights reserved
from Broken Kingdom
RiskPress
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission