Hookers

They were high rent
White corsets and panties and stockings and polished high heels
The kinds of clothes you'd freeze to death in outdoors at night if it wasn't August
And we
Packed a car like sardines
Scumbag teens
Driving from North Jersey to New York City
To go gawk at the sex objects
I failed to catch irony falling from my mouth
Telling my cousin
"You never see women like this
Just walking down the street"

They were impossible
Frustration crushing us from a distance
Limousines circled their block
Like prey
That didn't know how to get away
And they
Clicked a bone weary rhythm march that begged for interruption
Made pictures of themselves with stage makeup
And fluorescent house lights spaced into city block segments

Priestesses of all things undeniably male
Killing common sense in exchange
For giving all those men exactly what they wanted
What they didn't have the courage to find
Without sacrificing money as an offering
Too weak to be the kinds of men
That could have the kind of women they craved
So they caved
Kept their heads down until odd Fridays
Did the calculator dance on their paychecks
And set out to find controllable vice

But some of us were just there to watch
The silverback alpha males with drivers
With money to burn, with limp dicks that required
Two servants at a time to be reinflated
Who need to see a woman their daughter's age
Face down and faking with eager reaching hands
Catching nosebleeds from eroding addiction
Working to keep her pimp's blade sheathed

We
Never saw her ugliness
She was idealized
All potential and no damage
Perfect at the range outside the reach
Of our meager pocket cash
We circled
The block
Like vultures
Scouring the sights for hours
Scouting for slaughter
Wondering what sex and slow death
Smelled like
After it was cooking
In the sun
All day

by Mike O'Hara