“Have I heard of you?” she said.
I shook my head
And made reply
With an audible sigh,
“No for I am not yet dead.
But perhaps a paragraph or two
When I am through,
You will peruse
Before passing on to other news
About some celebrity or other, who has fallen from grace
And after whom our moral guardians chase.
Heaven forbid that I should make page three
For better models than me
Have appeared there,
And I would hate to upstage busty Claire
For we are both art
Of a kind.
Beauty resides in the mind of the beholder,
Take your pick, a girl’s bare shoulder
Or a writer’s heart.
—
1. “Page 3 is a colloquial term for a feature formerly included in the British tabloid newspaper The Sun.
The phrase originates with the publication of a large photograph of a topless, bare-breasted female glamour model who was usually shown on the print edition’s third page.
The feature first appeared in the newspaper on 17 November 1970 and on the official Page 3 website since June 1999, where it still continues.
The terms “Page 3” and “Page Three” are registered trademarks of News UK, parent company of The Sun, although the feature has been imitated in Britain’s other ‘red top’ tabloids”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_3).
2. The “Claire” in the above poem, is purely ficticious and any resemblance to anyone either living or dead is purely coincidental.
