A snippet on a neighbor’s radio, 
old Bowie cut,
the singer taking a “foxy kind of stand.”

“When you rock and roll with me,”
title lyric,  
that one time scandalous phrase now tea cozy quaint.

My neighbor whose radio is rocking
this bit of antiquity
is no more than thirty.  The song

is, as of today, forty-two.  I’m in
my mid fifties, out
in the sun, a lizard in the heat.

“When you rock and roll with me:” I’m not 
old enough
to recall that line first spelling sex to everyone,

but I know about it, and about sex of course,
how often
the one once led to the other, and can recall how Bowie

scared so many and made it a little
dangerous again
to rock and roll with him, to rock and roll

like him. “I’m in tears again.” The neighbor looks
at me funny as I
turn away.  I don’t know what he knows about

any of this — Bowie, rocking, rolling, sex,
nostalgia — but he must know 
enough because he changes the station

and lowers the volume.