"Currency of Touch" Poem, by Friendship, at My poetic side

"Currency of Touch"

I am a prostitute

Not a myth, not a whisper in shadow,

but a body mapping roads others cannot name,

each scar and smile a dialect in the language of survival.

They see the price first—

the brass weight of coins, the ledger of hours—

but not the math of hunger that taught me to trade

softness for shelter, breath for bread.

My hands,熟练 in the art of letting go,

have also cradled lullabies,

traced the spine of a favorite book,

held a mother’s tears like a secret.

Do not mistake the streetlight’s halo

for a lack of heart.

I, too, have counted stars,

though my constellation is measured in fleeting glances

and the silence between transactions.

Call me a mirror for the lonely,

a keeper of unspoken confessions,

a woman who knows the cost of every kiss

and still wonders if love is a word I’ll one day afford.

I am a prostitute.

But I am also the child who dreamed of flight,

the lover who once knew a name,

the ghost of a future bargained away—

and the soul, still whole,

who refuses to be a verb.

Will you look past the transaction?

Will you see the hands not just as giving,

But as reaching?