The Stripper

To follow up the story I posted about prostitution, I figured I'd post this piece I wrote. In this piece I was playing around with the spiritual meanings of numbers (just for fun as I don't believe in numerology since you can pretty much add things up any different way to get them to mean what you want them to mean).

The first two stanzas are 6 lines each (the number of the beast, also the 'human' number). The last stanza has 3 lines (the number of love, life, and the trinity). The whole piece (including the title) has 148 words. 1 is the number for God, or the beginning. 4 is the number for the material universe and creative works. 8 is the number for the new birth or new beginning.


The Stripper
“For tonight, with your own eyes, you will see my soul."
-Oscar Wilde

She snapped her stem two inches from someone’s
father’s nose as he swigged the eight dollar
pint of draught that he’d been baby-sipping
all night. He threw a dollar in his mouth and
slid it between the crack of her fluid stained
tanga. She smiled at him sideways and pulled it back across her lips.

The platform she poled from was warped and scarred
like runners at an old bowling alley. Cigarette burns
pocked the limbs of the bars like a sketch of her forearms.
She danced in dissociation inducing hypnotics upon
creatures cloaked in susceptibility. Nineteen and beautiful on the out-
side. Her insides tattered by hedonics like a picture of Dorian Gray.

And he stared into her from the corner like Basil into a fantastical
painting. He pictured them lying together in his garden, naked
and unaware beneath trees of immortality, sheltered from the fall.