Don’t pick fights with the bullies or the cads
’Cause I’m not much cop at punching other people’s dads
A midwinter spring, of sorts,
the day you died,
meltwater glazing the trees
at Schöneberg, the U-Bahn
hurtling beneath my feet as I crossed
to Innsbrucker Straße – and Klaus said
Hast du das nicht . . .? while my mind went back
to Louis and Pip
and Simon: ultra-
white boys
from the suburbs, single-
mindedly
unmanned, in borrowed
shirts and borrowed
make-up: ersatz rebels, erstwhile
saints,
but none of us much cop
at punching; though, till then, we hadn’t guessed
how weak we’d have to be
for that to matter.
John Burnside won the 2011 T S Eliot Prize and the 2011 Forward Poetry Prize for Black Cat Bone. His most recent collection is All One Breath (Jonathan Cape).
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This article appears in the 13 Jan 2016 issue of the New Statesman, David Bowie