Screenplay Writers Like Prostitutes

Screenplay writers like prostitutes;
They help move things along
To stay within the 100 minutes target
Skipping all sort of complications
(How will he get her to sleep with him);
In exchange the writers give them
A heart of gold and a happy ending .

With his profession (international selling)
And his awkwardness with women
He had learned enough about prostitutes
Not to expect a heart of gold
Or a happy end or much of anything.
He was too old for sex now
And thought of the women
When he didn’t want to feel sorry for himself.

There was a woman in NY, very pretty,
He thought too pretty for the agreed price
And the shabby establishment
Till came the time for her to undress
And she said “I hope you don’t mind
My mastectomy,” which he didn’t really
Only a scar where the breast used to be
Burned itself into his retina for ever.

Outside his hotel in Santo Domingo
A woman approached him
And explained in simple Spanish
That three women standing
On the other side of the street
Charged very little only because they were sick;
Grateful, he went out with her
And three days later had to look for penicillin.

The Russian woman at the Frankfurt airport
Was brusque to begin with
And become more short-tampered still
After he reminded her that he had paid
For an hour; but it wasn’t worth it
And he let her go; maybe she was freelancing
And worried about her pimp.

In Dar-es-Salam, at dusk
The approach was humble
But the tone was urgent
And when the price was named—
One dollar at the black market exchange rate—
He couldn’t say no. The place of business
Was the cab of a truck parked nearby.

That woman was a grandmother, for sure
And yet, of all the women he had ever met,
Paying for it or not,
None could compare to her beauty.
At least as he remembered it now and
Though he knew that memory played tricks
He liked this particular trick.

He hoped that
The money he handed over,
In greasy bills that stuck together,
Paid for some food and a child’s toy.