Wednesday, September 17, 2014

poem of the day 09.17.14


ode to the strip joints

twenty-one in pittsburgh
i guess there wasn’t much for guys like us to do
if we didn’t want to go to the bars or clubs

we went to strip joints some nights

for calvin and steve
it was a chance to see half-naked women

for me it was a chance
to get away from the only one
that i was currently seeing naked

the joints were never as bad
as people made them out to be

yes, they were smoky and soaked in neon
and the beer was over-priced

the bouncers could be assholes too

but the strip joints were a refuge of a sort
a place to hang your loneliness there with everyone else

plus there were the half-naked girls dancing
to r&b and heavy metal music

most of the women and their names
time has forgotten for me

but we liked this one, majesty

she was a buxom redhead with big tits and a nice ass
that she always loved to shove in your face
before you handed her over a dollar

she could’ve been twenty-five or forty back then
she could still be stripping now

majesty always paid attention to us guys
maybe because we looked gullible
or because we were the youngest ones in the joint

lord knows she made her money off of us
calvin and steve always fought over which one of them
was going to take her home

the strip joints were also places of magnificent fantasy

until one night majesty planted a kiss
right on steve’s glasses
fogging them with hot pink lipstick
that he could never get completely off

well, that pissed him good

so instead of hitting the strip joints
we spent some nights casing downtown pittsburgh
looking for whores

which calvin and steve thought
was kind of like doing the same thing

but from my drunken position in the backseat
looking at all of the closed-up shops
in the desolate city of my birth

listening to them argue about which one was going first
as i imagined majesty twirling and hustling

sticking that gorgeous ass in some other guy’s face

i felt that it was something different
almost sinister

like cheating indeed.

                                    

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