Because life’s too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won’t be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.
That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess. I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.
Was the audience afraid of being tainted
–this might rub off on me–
or were they–surrendering–
what a femme word–feeling
solicitous–glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?
At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It’s intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.
Copyright ©:
Alice Fulton
A few random poems:
- Or from that Sea of Time. by Walt Whitman
- Sonnet 33: Full many a glorious morning have I seen by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet 64: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced by William Shakespeare
- Robert Burns: Lines Written On A Banknote:
- The Iliad: Book VI (excerpt) poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- From an Essay on Man poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Hide-And-Seek by Vasko Popa
- Василий Жуковский – Суд Божий над епископом
- That The Night Come by William Butler Yeats
- Poem For People That Are Understandably Too Busy To Read Poetry by Stephen Dunn
- Алексей Толстой – Рука Алкида тяжела
- Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen
- Михаил Кузмин – Увы, любви своей не скрою
- Rubber Souls poem – Andrei Voznesensky poems
- Hope Holds to Christ poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- Chronicle
- Change
- Beauty
- Bathing River
- Bathing In The River
- Answer Copy Verses Sent Me Jersey
- Anacreontics The Swallow
- Anacreontics The Epicure
- Anacreontics Drinking
- An Answer To A Copy Of Verses Sent Me To Jersey
- Against Hope
- Against Fruition
- Summer Moon
- Stars
- Love Is Just Like The Rain
- Boy Running In The Rain
- Xai Kou From Book Seeds Of Faith
- Xai Kou1
- Xai Kou0
- Xai Kou
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works
