Long Playing Egg Poem

Eggs: Poached. Over Pulled Pork. On Griddled Croissant Toast.
Song: "Moonage Daydream" (Live 1973) by David Bowie (from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars Soundtrack)
apple music
spotify
Poem: "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" by Tracy K. Smith (from Life on Mars)
Don't You Wonder Sometimes
1.
 
After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure
 
That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?
 
Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired
 
And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.
 
 
          2.
 
He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours
 
Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.
 
Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
 
The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.
 
 
          3.
 
Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.
 
I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions
 
When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said:
                                                     Go ahead.
Notes: 
On the poach: The thrill of poaching an egg: sliding the egg into a simmering vortex. It feels acrobatic, risky, without a net. It's not hard to do, but it feels like doing it wrong could be disastrous-- the little sun of egg unbound from its gravitational nest, stretched and stripped into ribbons, flung to the far reaches of the pot. But when it holds, which really is always when done with a little care, it is a lovely thing. A little purse of egg. Open it up and sauce out the sun.

On the song: I'm an alligator. The future was way cooler in the 60s than it is in 2020s. They had all that silvery moon stuff. Hover cars, gizmos, and funny robots. And the future got even cooler--weirder, wilder--in the 70s. Bowie, alien ambassador, lands with Martian swagger, speaking English as a second language. We see Ziggy and the Spiders on stage and wonder whether its them or us who's strange. I listen to Kraftwerk, and I want to hit the dance floor with robots with gangly arms and creaky hips. Another, darker favorite from the 70s is Gary Numan, who obsesses (rather prophetically) about creepy cyborgs, about a future of bots and alienation. Sort of the musical analog to Blade Runner.

On the poem: Smith writes: "The future isn't what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts / For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky / like migratory souls." Those lines slay me. The sadness of those jets - beautiful and hopeful in their blinking, but ultimately bound to this earth. The migratory souls must return. Smith's scene reminds me of Mark Fisher on lost futures. Fisher argues that 21st-century culture is marked by anachronism and inertia, a "stasis [that] has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of 'newness', of perpetual movement. The 'jumbling up of time', the montaging of earlier eras, has ceased to be worthy of comment; it is so prevalent that it is no longer noticed." (6 Ghosts of My Life). Fisher here is observing how culture has stopped imagining a future, how it is more interested in retreading old films, old music, old culture-- anything retro-- than in leaning forward. Elsewhere, he puts it concisely: to be in the 21st century, is to have 20th century culture brought to us by 21st century technology. 

To make his case, Fisher invites us to contemplate when Kraftwerk came on the scene-- imagine how shockingly futuristic Kraftwerk sounded to listeners in 1970, how strangely futuristic. What, today, sounds like such a great leap forward into the unknown? Rather, Fisher points out that music (and other cultural artifacts) of the 21st century are really difficult to place in time. For example, he points to the Arctic Monkeys, whose song "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" could be from 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010.... it is timeless only in the static perjorative sense. Why has this happened? Fisher essentially argues that we have killed off all of the good futures we once imagined. Once, we dreamed about the future as positive progress, a place where we transcended what ails, a place bettered by dignity, justice, security, freedom. Instead, Fisher argues, we have given up our visions of more utopian futures, and have surrendered to the realism that there is no alternative to the advanced capitalism that has come to dominate.  The world, ever more efficiently commercialized, is not so much flattening out as it is hollowing out.

Fisher is writing (2013) before the rise of AI, but I think AI slop would be another case to validate what he is observing. As would the enshittification of the internet. More gray tentacles of capitalism choking us into cultural stasis, the sense of no-exit making us recoil from the future into a nostalgia for the past.  Our visions of living on other planets? Who wants to live on Mars when it is run by Musk? The promise of the internet? There are now more bots online than people, as it has (d)evolved into a commercial surveillance and persuasion machine. Our attention--which Simone Weil would argue that is, in its highest degree the same as a prayer, has now become a red hot economy. And can anyone now, still believe that life with AI (when AI is controlled by corporations) is going to be better, happier, more fulfilling than life without it? The enshittification of the market keeps spreading. Dollars and digits animate/decay all matter. Satellites in the sky. Betting markets on military operations. Where are the funky robots? The intergalactic rock stars? Come back, Bowie, save us.