What is a Bowem, you ask?
A Bowem is a poem inspired by David Bowie in an anachronous way. It is not a mere retelling of his stories, nor is it a direct response to any lyric or interview, but it is rather a new tale told as if in conversation with the entirety of Bowie’s catalogue, bringing together past and future in a way as to make the brains of anyone fizzle, even if they don’t know a thing about Bowie.
Importantly, if the knowledge of Bowie was entirely erased from humanity, a Bowem still has to make sense. In that way, it is its own creature.
I invented Bowietry in 2015, and I’ll do a post talking about it soon, but for now, here’s the first Bowem. Several small collections will come out over the next few years, with the first one at least being free.
This Bowem also uses the Collapsor (tm), a poetic device I invented in 2015 also. The Collapsor, if you’re not familiar, allows for English words to be superimposed in a quantum superposition whereby the reader (or listener) can settle on different tracks, or worldlines, leading the poem to multiple different emotional or narrative conclusions, or many simultaneously. It is this weird element of poetry that actually inspired the dimension-hopping chapters in my debut book Who Built The Humans? (which, by the way, is now on sale for only one dollar everywhere, including Amazon, who finally caught up with the pricing (link below)). Here, the Collapsor is in a peculiar place, the title, and gives the reader the chance to read the poem’s title as Arthurian, Arcturian, or both.
Ar[th/ct]urian
jiving out in space so high
the red star knows what’s up
screws the airlock nice and tight
takes his protein and takes his flight
round and round goes all our heads
sweeping sliding down grassy hill
mother would be oh so worried
but doctors put her on a pill
now she sines and waves as we crash and burn
cardboard spaceships spinning
and the future’s been written so there’s little left to learn
and mother stands there grinning
the town psych ward overflows with laughter
as papers flood with unwritten tears
and comics smeared, their reputations
left no room for childish fears
in the conservatory, someone lied about you
and in the library, someone lied about the universe
shelves are filled with dead men’s daydreams
from the profound to the perverse
so this isn’t a world, it’s a parody
it’s not a play, it’s an outburst
this fleeing town, this fleeting time
is little more than a starburst
and they don’t want knowledge, they want deities
to push them from place to place
they hope that, flicking through our story, some lonely god
might pause and remember their face
END
That’s the first Bowem in the Bollection of Boweitry, which will be published in January 2026.
It will be free.
What did you think?
Merry Christmas everyone!
The sales pitch from outer space!
And, if you were after buying yourself Who Built The Humans? for Christmas, now is a good time to do it, as it is down to 1 dollar in all retailers.
WBTH is my debut Novelthology of 11 Sci-Fi and Comedy universes, each battling over 47 chapters that you can read in any order, making the book as simple or as complex as you like.
WBTH also contains a mini Sci-Fi poetry collection titled THE ON-SERIES in which the world ends in various delirious ways thanks to your choices as the reader. This is where my popular character Tin Foil Tim came from. This was also my first published poetry collection, hidden inside WBTH as its purpose there is to appear once every three chapters like a satellite, to tell jokes about the heavy concepts either side of it (such as AI, the afterlife, and vanity presses).