1.
David Bowie sang “Young Americans”
endlessly with his hair dyed pure black
and his skewed eyes fixed
on the vision he’d been after all his life,
knowing that trail of shine and substance
he’d left behind surely had led somewhere
but from this end, it was hard to describe what
this place was, the long hours and crowds
vanishing in the sodium lights, Ohio a memory,
Berlin a memory, New York a future memory
and ahead only the business of describing
buses of survivors rolling on broken roads,
his wonderful hands filled with cocaine,
bruised children, the keys to buildings
unbuilt; his voice spilling out between stretched fingers.

2.
I bought all your records.
Then, you showed up
in my mom’s collection.
I owned you, damnit.
No escapes allowed.
You have ceased to be the target
I aimed at for so many years.
I won’t wear you on my mask anymore,
since she’s already there.

3.
The lost chord, as the Moody Blues called it,
was played one day in 1994 by a Winger fan
who abandoned it in favor of another speedy run
at a pentatonic box. It had edges as long
as the Lake Michigan coast and stuck into the ground
where it fell. A fault opened around the point
of entry and we fell into it one day
wondering “what is this place?” When the guitar
I was holding broke a string on its own, unplayed,
we fled. After, we tried to describe it
and decided that you couldn’t really call what it sounded like
rock, or pop, or punk, or jazz; more like volcano, or meadow,
or the burn on your elbows after sex on the carpet.
It was less music than geometry. Physics perhaps, or biology;
the striations of the voluntary muscles drawn out to breaking.
It sounded fatal. This hasn’t stopped me
from trying to play it again.