After Rabelais.
His eyes are like extinguished lighthouses
His eyebrows are a gadderie of fiddlers
His nose a broken sea-arch
His jaw is like the blue ramp of the ferry lowering
then clanking shut
His mouth a hollow gloup
His teeth smashed Blue Vodka bottles
His saliva is like the seven tides of Shetland
His chest hair a scratchy kishie
His arms whirling wind turbines
His elbows are like crane-winches
His legs are posts bristling with barnacles
His buttocks are half-submerged skerries
His member is like the seal's head bobbing up
and down in the harbour
His bollocks are ponies' nose-bag
His pubic hair is the hay-nets flung
over plastic rubbish bags
His arsehole is like the slippery steps down
to the lower deck
His urine is the swell in a Force 10 gale
His sweat is salty houb water
His oxters are like scories' nests
His nipples are the rings of salmon- traps
His navel is a fire-bucket peppered
with fag butts
His skin is like stiff, sea-drenched gaiters
His breath's a blow-hole
His sigh the haar
His fart is like the flare at Sullom Voe
Stephanie Green
Glossary: trowie - a Shetland troll or goblin; sixereen - a six-oared rowing boat; geo- a narrow chasm, often ending in a cliff falling at right angles to a beach; gadderie - a gathering; voe - a sea-loch; kishie - woven straw basket used in pairs as panniers either side of a pony’s back; gloup - a collapsed cave; skerries - rocks in the sea, submerged at certain times; houb - a salty loch; oxter - arm-pit; scorie - adolescent herring-gull; haar- a sea-mist; Sullom Voe - the oil refinery.
Published in the author's pamphlet 'Flout' (HappenStance, 2015).
Also published in the 'Mildly Erotic Verse' anthology (Emma Press, 2016.)
An earlier version was published in Northwords Now.