Hooker Apocrypha

No one wastes her own life.
The world wastes all of us

One way or another.
Some ways fascinate us

More than others, that's all.
Miners' and prostitutes'

Ghosts haunt hard-scrabble towns
In North America,

And imaginations
Run loose in emptied streets

Where brick facades totter
Over boarded storefronts.

Here there was a gunfight;
Here was the bordello.

I've heard tell the Silver
Belle once held a hundred

Hookers serving thousands
Of desperate miners,

Ruled by a black madam
From Spokane who retired

A millionaire and lived
Long after all her girls

And their miners were dead.
I've heard tell that Wallace,

Idaho had legal
Prostitution until

Yesterday and that most
Ghost towns in Nevada

Have prostitution still.
I've heard tell a Dream Mine

In Utah was revealed
In a saintly vision

And that the once-booming
Town of Helper, Utah,

Just over the summit
From that magical mine,

Was named after the whores
Who were miners' "helpers."

We get small thrills, passing
Through small-scale disasters,

Through carious pockets
Of calamitous greed.

We're fond of our stories
Of wealth lost, youth wasted,

Of dreams brought to sordid,
Tragic, untimely ends.

We prefer them to tales
Of pious farming wives

And retired insurance
Salesmen fading away

In their nursing-home haze,
Not because those rough lives

Were wild, sad and wasted,
But because our tame lives,

So carefully conserved,
Wait, destined for wasting.