I'm no poet and I know it. This isn't really a poem, it's just bulletpoint prose.
In the centrally-heated front room of a terraced house we huddled.
Waiting for the stripper.
Piled onto the sofa.
A single chair facing us on a sea of beige carpet.
To this chair was led the blushing birthday boy.
Red with embarrassment, blindfolded with a work tie.
Led to execution.
A torture chamber of mortification.
In came the stripper.
A fancy dress shop PVC nurses uniform
Struggling to contain a real-life nurse’s body.
Her cassette player had been set up.
The blind fold came off.
Anticipation shifting to awkwardness.
She rubbed squirty cream from a can into
her podgy, battered body.
A pallid moonscape of fat rolls and cellulite.
Impossible to tell where the cream finished
and the body began.
The tie wrapped around his head
The birthday boys face was pushed into two sagging
pancakey breasts, a mess of flesh.
“How much to keep the clothes on?”
My 22 year old self quipped.
The stripper hesitated.
It was the most insensitive thing I had ever said.
