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:
- Sonnet 06
- Signals by Walid Saba
- Жан де Лафонтен – Астролог, упавший в колодец
- Аnything can happen
- Василий Тредиаковский – Ну, так уже я не стал быть вашим отныне
- Winged And Acid Dark by Robert Hass
- Kore by Robert Creeley
- Юнна Мориц – Это вьюги хрустящий калач
- I saw a man pursuing the horizon by Stephen Crane
- I Have A Friend I Can Proudly Say by Miraj Patel
- On Chloris requesting a sprig of blossom’d thorn by Robert Burns
- Moonlight by Vita Sackville-West
- A Grace after Meat by Robert Burns
- Николай Карамзин – К Дмитриеву (Многие барды, лиру настроив)
- Scythe Song poem – Andrew Lang 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
- Spring by Ramesh Anand
- Remember the Tick by RD McManes
- re_word by RD McManes
- Rain by Reena Ribalow
- Carnal Knowledge by Rebecca Elson
- We Astronomers by Rebecca Elson
- This Morning by Raymond Carver
- Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year by Raymond Carver
- No Chance To A New Life by Rashmi Sreekumar
- Live for the moment, be in the present by Ramesh V Deshpande
- Late Fragment by Raymond Carver
- Jobless by Rashmi
- I’m not listening by Rashmi Sreekumar
- Flutter by Rashmi Sreekumar
- Fear by Raymond Carver
- Drinking While Driving by Raymond Carver
- Circulation by Raymond Carver
- Butterfly by Ramesh Anand
- Bobber by Raymond Carver
- Autumn by Ramesh Anand
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