Stripper

I’m a looker, I’m fit

I’m a girl with class

don’t you really long

to see me strip to my lycra thong

as I wriggle to the tune of the raunchy song

to a sea of faces in the shadowy throng

of men from the firms in the office blocks

and the pc worlds;

I’m your thing in dreams,

the pliable barbie of your private scenes,

I’m a page 3 pic

that you flip to quick -

an icon from a world where the soft porn girl

is a look-real-pearl that appeases the needs

of the office boys and the men in tweeds.

I dance on the laps

of a whole dirty dozen of leering chaps,

reflected in the gaze of the one who pays

for a scent of my skin and the hoped for fling

of a one-night stand –

reduced to a grope from a furtive hand.

As a pale light dawns on a tired morn

and she finds her way from the reek and haze

of the midnight bar

and the hungry gaze of so many men -

another lean girl from a dirty world

whose stock in trade is youth and beauty that will never last

and she’s teased by the hopes of her youth that passed

too quickly, in all those misspent hours

window shopping in the tawdry malls,

and the shabby halls of imagined fame,

deep in the thrall of glamour from the world

whose profit is the gain of the merchant men

who dismiss her kind as legitimised sin,

whose lust for thrill and salacious whim

have turned women like her to a sexual thing -

a toy for the joy of the boys in the bars

and she wears the scars of her secret shame

as a sexy smile, but her eyes betray

the desperation of the game

that’s changed her name from a lady to a tart

and she can’t get smart or even have the luck

to cut loose now

before the raucous shouts of the jeering louts

claim another fraction of her yearning soul

and she sinks ever deeper in the yawning hole.

But she knows she’s free and enjoying her right

to make her choice and in the sight of the world

she serves, they want her to believe that liberty

is a freedom of trade, and they’re free to enslave

to exploit and use women like her

in the mags and the rags and the sleazy shows

and the grotty little bars where no-one knows

her privacy, her pain or her goddamned name

as long as she smiles and pouts

and flaunts to the louts that hurl her cash,

but secretly condemn her as a piece of trash.