ABOUT THE POEM: This piece sits at the crossroads of intimacy, performance, and the strange economics of longing. The speaker reflects on a past friendship with someone who existed outside the transactional world he now inhabits. He watches how desire can be industrialised—how sex work becomes a craft shaped by repetition, discipline, and emotional detachment. By comparing the whore’s labour to that of the cobbler, the labourer, and the student, the poem reframes sex work as a learned skill rather than a moral category. The woman at the centre is split between her professional persona and her private, shy self: one learned to be wanted, the other never learned how to receive desire without cost. Against this backdrop, the speaker realises that the only real tenderness he ever knew came from a friendship free of exchange. The contrast is stark: the world of meters, folded bills, and manufactured desire versus a bond where nothing was bought. His grief is not for lost romance but for the disappearance of a space where he could exist without being consumed or measured. What hurts most is not the absence of touch but the absence of connection that wasn’t for sale.Living without you has been difficult.
I keep thinking we could be friends once again.
Just as the labourer’s hands grow calloused from honest toil,
the cobbler’s fingers learn the secret language of leather and thread,
and the student’s mind bends toward mastery through endless repetition-
so the whore perfects a craft that looks like desire
but is really the art of thinking past the body:
calculating angles of greed with surgical calm,
smiling just wide enough to keep the meter running.
And in doing so, the hunger for more begins to consume the customer whole.
The high-end call girl is subtler still.
With every booked hour she collects small fragments of men-
their lies, their loneliness, the way they say baby like a prayer-
and over years she opens, petal by mechanical petal,
until the performance feels almost like confession.
But none of it means she is that girl.
Strip away the dim red light, the practiced moan, the cash folded neat,
and what remains is someone startlingly shy-
someone who blushes at small talk in daylight,
who apologises for taking up space on a tram,
who would rather die bleeding than let a stranger see her cry.
She might even slap her own butt daily for excitement,
but she knows she’s naughty, not insane.
The bed teaches her everything about hunger.
The world outside never taught her how to be wanted
for anything more than an hour at a time.
You and I, my dear,
were friends without a meter running.
That was the rarest currency of all-
and I miss it more than I miss being touched.
