A Mix Tape: The Hit Singularities

(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...