I've never posted in this forum before, but I figure I should give it a shot. I'm in a creative writing poetry class this semester, and I've written five or six poems so far. A few of them I thought have worked pretty well, some need a lot of work, yada yada yada. I figure I'd throw one up here to get some feedback from you kind people. If it works out, I may post more.

This poem has a little bit of backstory. My prof told us our poems were good, but we were a little too trapped in our own experiences and lives. So he had us take out a piece of paper and write down and occupation. He said we should make it as unique and bizzare as possible. Then we were to put them all in a hat, pick one out, then write about whichever we picked. So for example, I wrote on my piece, "The guy who puts the little plastic things on the end of shoelaces." Let's see someone write about THAT. But karma got me, as I picked out, "A stripper who puts her clothes on for money." I was stuck for a while, I didn't know where to take it. Then tonight I sat down and, in pretty much one pen stroke, I wrote this.

It's called "Naked."

You can get people to pay for anything
When you convince them it’s exotic
That they can’t get it anywhere else.
As soon as you get asses in the seats,
After that first time, they’re addicted.
It’s worse than a drug because
There’s a false sense of community
Somewhere in the bar-stained tabletops,
The dimmed lights
And the smoke-filled corners.

I never felt bad before
When men handed over fifty,
Seventy, two hundred dollars in a night.
I didn’t believe in perversion.
We all have natural, animal instincts
And if some people express them
By watching me take my clothes off,
I won’t object; and the money’s nice.

But there’s something wrong with this,
This new attraction sweeping people up.
Some forward-thinking promoter hatched it,
An idea for just one night:
What if the girls put their clothes on?
At the least, good for a laugh.
But something happened: everyone came.
Biggest money draw ever
Except for each Christmas Eve.

And so it became every other Wednesday,
Then once a weekend, then eight times a month.
Now I work at the only
Gentleman’s club on the eastern seaboard
Where drunks throw crumpled ones
To try to make get dressed
Faster, faster and faster,
Every single night.


You don’t know anything about me.
You don’t want to know anything.
You don’t want to know who I am.
You don’t want to know where I’ve been.
You don’t want to know what I’ve seen.
You don’t want to know where I'm going.

But there’s something about this I just can’t stand;
It’s a perversion of a perversion.
There’s something cathartic about being nude
In front of an audience,
Or in front of your husband,
A lover, or anyone willing to accept you,
Flaws and all.

In dressing you get none of this;
You’re covering up everything ugly,
Everything you need someone for,
Everything never meant to be seen
But which has to be shown.
When I hear someone yell,
“There’s a twenty in it for you
If you can clasp your bra with one hand,”
I feel shame for the first time.

I am only naked and alone
When I am fully clothed.
No one should live like this.

Awesome work man. A. Only one change:

You don’t know anything about me.
You don’t want to know anything.
You don’t want to know who I am.
You don’t want to know where I’ve been.
You don’t want to know what I’ve seen.
You don’t want to know where I'm going.

Those are great lines, but unoriginal.

Matt, I don't know what to say. Not that it's a bad thing, but I don't know what to say.