Sometimes, all a girl gots is her fuck

I’d met him at the bar, or just outside it – a dive in DC
where the powerful were not: just those of us dead inside.
He’d told me he was a pimp, but i didn’t see any of his whores.
The conversation was muddled and muted, when he finally said,
“Sometimes, all a girl gots is her fuck. Some girls: they don’t know nothing
but how to fuck. And, you know, they gotta eat too.”
I was young then; really just starting out in the world:
I still believed in love and romance back then –
before the beatings took me down, the morning alarm clocks,
the Rail martinis, the lost nights in debtors’ rooms,
the muffled cries of the whores in the morning
where I tried to rid myself of loneliness,
before the engines noise swallowed my soul whole,
and commuting was the beginning of a sentence,
not the end.
Penelope reminds me of that encounter every day:
she can’t clean a thing and burns the coffee every time,
ruins appliances, destroys poetry, mangles the laundry,
breaks the dishes and loses my important papers,
but she pays for her keep with her fuck.