It's National Poetry Day!

So here's one wot I wrote earlier.

(I was commissioned by my friend Margaret Thomson Davis, to write a series of poems for her novel, "Red Alert". The brief she gave me for this character was that she was in her late teens and about to go off to art school. She lived alone with her mother who had Victorian attitudes - and who believed her daughter was going to be drawing bowls of fruit and embroidering lace. Wrong! The young female character expressed herself through a series of poems in her diary - and Margaret asked me to produce the poems.)

Rule of Thumb

She hides behind her thumb

under the guise of the first

lesson in perspective. She stretches

her arm out like a thin, pale promontory

her thumb as beacon,

rigid at the far end

warning of the rocks beyond. 

Her first life model, on the first day

of life classes is naked. And male.

Wearing nothing

but an everyday expression.

The statues that line the hall didn’t prepare her.

Smooth and cold and lifelike no comparison

for smooth and warm and life. With hair.

She didn’t know there would be so much hair.

Dark against the celtic pale of his skin,

it marked him with a t-shape. The crossbar

waved and curled across the tight muscle of his chest

meeting in the middle

where it warmed his heart.

Her eyes trace the line as it narrows

on its path to the navel, before

swelling in a dark tattoo at the groin.

The man must have read her line of sight.

His cheeks bunch with a suppressed smile.

Hers burn as bright as a lighthouse.

She withdraws from his scrutiny

and finds sanctuary behind her thumb.

(NB. This poem doesn't feature in the above collection. I wanted an image to go with the poem and I couldn't be bothered trawling the net for drawings of naked men. Sorry, ladies.)