The lesson requires a specific weight of lead,
a rigid discipline applied directly to the grain.
The academy teaches exactly how to shade the world:
with heavy cross-hatches, defining the unyielding,
measuring the standard by the blunt force of the jaw.
But the subject today defies the syllabus.
He offers no pillars, no stony architecture—
only the pale, trembling curve of a reed.
And you—you recognize that look of being broken.
You know the quiet tragedy of standing exposed.
The room grows loud with the friction of carbon.
A collective whisper, a sharp, caught breath—
for something in your composition is rising,
unruly, breaking the flat horizon of the page.
A sudden, blood-warm pulse betrays his stillness,
and it aches in you, a familiar, heavy grief.
The curriculum warns against harboring the heat.
The rulebook insists your eyes must remain cool,
dictating that a posture so delicate, so responsive,
should only evoke a clinical note, or a smirk—
never a sanctuary. Never a home for what you lack.
Yet, note the tension where the edge meets the paper.
The double-edged stroke.
You refuse to wield the traditional sword,
choosing instead to sketch a quiet perimeter around his blush.
To admire a grace that does not seek to conquer,
to covet a softness that stands entirely unarmored—
this is the treason the gallery forbids.
They allow you to replicate the form,
but they censor your desperate hunger to protect it.
Watch the clock.
The graphite smudges under the deliberate pressure of my thumb.
I erase the rigid boundaries I was forced to memorize,
mourning the years I spent drawing them at all.
I leave only the impression of a sovereign vulnerability.
They wanted us to document a bashful subject.
Instead, I find myself learning how to guard a queen
who rules without a single weapon.
The floorboard behind me groans under a heavy heel.
The scratch of forty pencils suddenly dies,
leaving only the loud, rhythmic thud of a pulse in my throat.
A shadow falls across my page, thick and institutional,
blotting out the amber light that warmed his shoulder.
A hand, dry and smelling of turpentine, descends.
Two fingers rest on the top wire of my sketchbook,
not yet pulling, but holding my hands entirely still.
From the dais, his eyes lift, catching mine through the silence—
a shared, fragile anchor before my verdict drops.
The shadow leans in closer. The charcoal stains my fingertips like ash.
