Sunday poetry

Girls Who Read

“So, what do you go for in a girl?” he crows,
lifting the lager to his lips.
He gestures where his mate sits,
then downs his glass.
“He prefers tits.
I prefer arse.
What do you go for in a girl?”

Well, um, I feel quite uncomfortable,
the air left the room a long time ago,
all eyes are on me.
If you must know, I like a girl who...reads.
Yeah, reads.

I’m not trying to call you a chauvinist
because I know that you’re not alone in this,
but I’d like a girl who reads.
Who needs the written words
and who uses the added vocabulary
she gleans from novels and poetry
to hold lively conversation
in a range of social situations.

I like a girl who reads,
whose heart bleeds at the words of Graham Greene
...or even Heat magazine.
Who ties back her hair while she’s reading Jane Eyre
and who goes cover to cover with each Waterstones three for two offer.
But I want a girl who won’t even stop there.

I want a girl who reads,
who feeds her addiction for fiction
with unusual poems and plays
that she hunts out in crooked bookshops
for days and days and days.

She’ll sit addicted at breakfast,
soaking up the back of the cornflakes box
and the info she gets from what she reads
makes her a total fox.
Because she’s interesting and she’s unique
and her theories make me go weak
at the knees.

I want a girl who reads.
A girl whose eyes will analyze
the menu over dinner,
who’ll use what she learns
to kick my arse in arguments
so she always ends the winner, but she’d still be sweet
and she’d still be flirty ’cos she loves the classics
and they’re pretty dirty.

And that means late at night
she’ll always have me in a stupor,
as we re-enact the raunchy bits
from the works of Jilly Cooper.

See, some guys prefer arses,
some prefer tits,
and I am not saying that I don’t like those bits.
But what’s more important, what supercedes,
is a girl with passion, wit and dreams.
So I like a girl who reads.

~ Mark Grist