Stripper

© 5 March 2007, The Griot Poet

Dedicated to Pamela East Alexander (circa 1961 – 1977), Vicky Lynn Marshall (1967 – 2007) and kindred spirits that struggle through domestic violence, rape and the depravity to women known as pornography.

Under the stupor of liquor and throbbing neon disco lights I fight for my right next to the stage, throne of your stripper pole.

I am in a bestial rage to see flesh.

I don’t care to hear that you might be a wounded spirit, or that someone might once have held you dear.

For I fear that will make me lose my self-infatuation with fantasy gratification, and make me place the dollar behind my ear soberly back in my pocket.

Like, I don’t care:
That your own mother ripped an electric cord out of the wall to beat you bloody and senseless because you told her that her latest boyfriend stole your innocence (‘cause eleven-year-old girls have to be lying!).

I don’t care:
That you spent your nights crying yourself to sleep for peace and recompense and that the same lowlife creep offered you MONEY for the precious gift of your husband’s honey he’d already taken…

I don’t care:
That the one time in your history you met a nice boy who loved YOU, the “beast that walked like a man” * splayed buckshot into his torso and through his love struck heart, or that a stray bullet hit your baby sister (a favor: she had just turned eleven!).

I don’t care:
That the two loves in your life are safely in Heaven,

That you left home five years past eleven,

That you went to L.A. for a “model agency” and met a Hugh-Hefner-want-to-be clone that spread you prone on the casting couch of sorrow…

That your tomorrows are measured by hits:

Hits from a blunt,
Hits from hard liquor,
Hits from a needle,
Hits from ecstasy to dull the hits from fists that planted his seed in you that you now have to raise his child as a single mother: he tried to put a murder contract on you to cover his tracks (‘cause married cops aren’t supposed to act like that!).

Your two great loves safely in Heaven,

Your life a swollen bread of leaven,

Your natural affection turned out to women,

You play your role on a stage with an Asherah stripper’s pole,

Throne room of hell’s fires below

Surrounded by lusting demons with dollars behind their ears, “beast that walk like men,” * like me.

Marvin said, “Makes me wanna holla” and run Joseph’s sprint from Pontifer’s palace

Away from this place of sorcery and malice

And pray for your and my souls

Before we are both consumed by the very thing we think we can control!

* Maya Angelo, CD: Black Pearls – The Poetry of Maya Angelo, © 1969 & 1998, "No, No, No, No."