when I was 22

5 years ago
22 during Bush's first term
And I was trying so hard.
I was trying not to watch the men watch the dancers.
Trying to stay off the powder, trying to graduate college, trying not to vomit.
I was trying not to love a girl who loved a boy that I could not love.
It was all very painful and exciting, unplanned, chaotic.

So I watched the dancers and smoked in the back corner of the room. The students, the moms, the sisters.
The fatty, the dready, the hippie, the goth. From 18 to 48 they were all women in disrepair who shone for 5-minute intervals twice an hour
then circled with legs hoisted and teeth bare. The meat from their last kill still stuck to their gums. Spinning in the strobe, sliding up and down the clean brass pole while I schlepped Jack, & Jim to bored husbands, bankers, dealers.
Cigarettes were still legal then and the smoke swirling in the red lights was the prettiest thing in my life at the time.