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Reading from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus festival, 2012
after W. Todd Kaneko and David Bowie
Angie Bowie was the first woman
in interstellar space. When she left
Earth’s orbit, she could be heard to say:
Faith can only take you so far /
Look Zowie, mummy can fly /
I’m never coming back.
Angie once slept for forty days and forty nights.
When she woke, it was 1969
and her first husband was singing this love song
by way of proposal.
On her mother’s side, Angie Bowie
is the great-great-great-granddaughter
of Aphrodite. As such, she has the power
to grant favour in love, though is cursed
to have no control over her own fate.
On her father’s side, she is descended
from electric eels: hence everything else.
Angie Bowie comes from an ancient tribe
of Europeans that doesn’t sleep.
That’s how she had so much
sex in the seventies.
Angie Bowie was born in Cyprus,
spent seven years learning manners
in Switzerland, got kicked out
of a private school for meddling
with another girl. She moved
to Kingston in 1967, and then
she turned into a swan.
In another universe, Angie Bowie is known
for playing Wonder Woman and has the best-selling
DC action figure of all time modelled after her
scandalous waistline. In our universe, they say
casting turned her down because
she refused to wear a bra.
When Angie was born, Mars, Venus and Jupiter
rose in conjunction with the moon,
a once-in-a-millennium celestial bracelet
visible only from Earth. The midwife told
her mother, “Be careful with this one.
She’ll have powers beyond her ken.”
Although more widely known as the Barmaid of
the Deadrockstar, in Bromley she’s known as
the Fairy of the Glades, in Cyprus as George
and Helena’s girl, and in the States
as the Glitter Goddess of the Sunset Strip.
Angie Bowie wrote the book on Bisexuality,
published by Pocket Essentials in 2002.
In it, she details the entire history of the preference,
which was told to her by her great-great-great-
grandmother, an electric eel. Nobody knows
exactly how eels reproduce. The only fact
we know for sure about Angie Bowie is this.
In 2004, scientists discovered a star orbiting Betelgeuse,
which shone fifteen times brighter than our sun. They named it
after Angie, the prettiest star. Astronomers believe it
has already gone supernova, but the light hasn’t reached us yet.
That night, Angie was wearing a pink velvet suit.
That night, a cheetah print all-in-one by Alexander McQueen.
That night, her ex’s leather jacket with DARE ME patched on the back.
Angie spent the final days of the millennium
in the seas around Paphos, trying to grow gills.
“I’m going to breathe water if it’s the death of me,”
she told her girlfriend, who held hands
with the lifeguard nervously on the shore.
After several days, Poseidon rose to say,
“What are you doing here, Angie?
You don’t belong in the water.”
She replied, “Great King Poseidon,
I came from this place. I don’t know
where I belong, but this is where I want to be.”
He said, “But weren’t you the subject of that
song on Aladdin Sane, you know, The Prettiest
Star? My brother Zeus knows people in the sky.
Why don’t you let me call him?” Angie said,
“I really wish you hadn’t brought that up,”
bit Poseidon’s left arm till it bled blue
and swam up to the surface, looking for a place
that didn’t know the lightning man.
Angie Bowie found out about the death of her first husband
when she was on Celebrity Big Brother.
The producers took her off air to deliver the news.
They filmed her reactions in the Diary Room soon after.
She left the show early due to ill health.
Angie Bowie was a finger beckoning.
Then she was a crown, but all the jewels fell out.
Then she was a pine, shedding in the city.
Then she was a snake, whose fangs wouldn’t reach her tail.
Then she was a carpenter who nobody would hire.
Now, she is the bassline in a messed-up love song.
In 1969, Angie Bowie’s first husband proposed
down the phone to her by singing this song.
She later said, “We got married
so I could [get a permit to] work…
I didn’t think it would last
and [he] said, before we got married,
‘I’m not really in love with you,’
and I thought that’s probably a good thing.”
There are many legends about Angie Bowie’s
first husband, too. I think you might know a few
about the warlocks, the spiders. One lesser-known legend
tells of Sunday afternoons of toast and butter and tea,
of singing at the piano while his wife and son
danced around the living room, twinkling.
A shotgun in her parlour, Amazon says Enter.
A barefoot wedding. She gestures like treacle,
a guttering of purple in a dugout canoe on the
dream banks of the living room carpet. A diva, she
demands more body. Her want is citrus scented.
She waits in silence, a pulsating black
widow's abdomen. A calling. When you finally
wade into the first-sex smell of nectarines, she
tells you a night-time scare story : of alien
autopsy, the power of the drum, and the psychic
potential of humankind. Designed to send your
blood into the web. "Relinquish" she mouths into
the spaces between your outstretched fingers. Give
way to the sinking vibration of a temple bell. Let
her drop you, head first into the green with
nothing more to cling to than the ozone, ivy and
spider within.