(Side A)

1. “Like a Virgin”—Madonna

How to look out the window

and see something other

than the smear of purple apricot

that velvet sunset left

on my terrifying private sky,

in 1983?

2. “Cruel Summer”—Bananarama

They didn’t last the afternoon,

any of those three dates in a week,

three new guys I’d met.

I said yes to a drive to the beach,

to lunch at Sizzler and lunch

at a salad place.

I thought I was getting ready,

Sun-in in my perm, but we could tell

by the silence.

It wasn’t hungry or angry. Didn’t

want a stronger stranger,

or even dessert.

Just caressed everything hopeless

with no muscles at all. Thanks!

See you in school.

3. “Let’s Go Crazy”—Prince

Tonight’s hemophiliac moon,

(talented cheat) is brilliant

in the role of understudy

to the sometimes mad eye of Venus.

Or:

Being a smart girl who wants

to be in love is like breaking a leg

in a boring accident (sidewalk trip)

but the wound gets a disease (gangrene)

so everyone looks at you funny

but they don’t really notice you.

4. “Nobody’s Diary”—Yaz

How do I deceive myself?

Do I act my happiness?

Am I good at acting it?

I live in a large box of air

playing records so unhappily.

I can’t forget how you looked

at me, like I wasn’t me and you

weren’t you. How to change?

How to change everything

into everything you like?

5. “How Soon Is Now”—The Smiths

Blood in the mouth

is so familiar, metal

in liquid form come

up to nourish source.

So we put to lips what

cuts us: paper, wood,

wire, knife, teeth.

I bite my tongue in two

when I smell your hair,

that Aquanet. When

will I know the smallest

hair? The softer things?

6. “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”—Dead or Alive

Words: the berries of the cosmos,

plucked from their system

then changed beyond belief

because you don’t believe me.

(Side B)

1. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”—Culture Club

Against ourselves

we stand no chance—

we chop our wood,

jack our trades, gas

our cars, shave our heads

bare in solidarity with

not dying. We are

the miracle meat.

Sandwiches nobody

buys, wrapped in plastic

on display against

our wishes against

ourselves again.

2. “I Ran (So Far Away)” —Flock of Seagulls

I ran away only to prove

I chose my next move somehow.

Really you did not lose me:

you walked away. I sat there waiting

but you were gone. Only then did I run,

to salvage a mile or two of my own.

I don’t know how much of my own story

is true and what I’ve had to believe.

Really I think I just sat there self-thinking

the same cruel sentences:

You fool yourself, you do. And you know it, liar.

I couldn’t get away.

3. “Here Comes the Rain Again”—Eurythmics

No kind nana

with papery hands to click

her knitting needles

and tell you that memory

itself used to have memory.

This wet dump doesn’t

remember falling year

after year, but it did, does,

the very same stuff.

Water is One, to Old Earth-

Sky, even if we divide it

by tasks, titles, time.

4. “Words”—Missing Persons

“Do you hear me? Do you care?”

If words were material

and not ether, ink, rivulet

of breath in space,

they’d have a hand-stitched

quality, each a starsplat

of sleep on a plain white

tight cotton sheet that robots

wove on their industrial looms.

They want us comfortable.

5. “New Moon on Monday”— Duran Duran

Changeling starlings landing

on a line of verse or vine of voice

so singular

it’s not inhuman but unihuman.

Simon says he’s synced

to a perfect keyboard,

there’s truth in synth.

That’s what synth means:

to make true. An everglow

lost among the speechless.

Le bon mot swallows the night.

6. “(Keep Feeling) Fascination”—The Human League

I’m blinded by vision, like an artist

who paints miniature landscapes

and portraits on a grain of sand

using a microscope and tweezers

who yells, “Fuck!” when the tiny

brush with its single mouse hair slips

and ruins the mountaintop the artist

has been scaling all morning, hoping

to peak by lunch. It was never going

to be a masterpiece, we know that,

but it does hold fast whatever art is in us,

that thing that blooms like failure and is.

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