We’d all heard that Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a live bat during concerts.
Someone said Prince’s guitarist went down on him on stage every night during
“Darling Nikki.” I once told a kid at my lunch table I had heard that Madonna
sang “fucked for the very first time” instead of “touched” when she did “Like a
Virgin” live, as if I had sources who attended concerts & reported back to me
about the good parts. Apparently Madonna wasn’t very nice to the two guys who
wrote that song, & if you read interviews with them, thirty years later they’re still
bitter about it, to the point where they seem petty. All we have are the stories we
invent. Remember that moment you realized you could say anything you wanted?
Such freedom! Such power! I hope you didn’t waste it making up shit about
Madonna.

Amorak Huey is author of three books of poetry, most recently Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), as well as two chapbooks. He is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.