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:
- On The Death Of Sir Henry Wootton
- Sonnet CXLV by William Shakespeare
- Excerpt – “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by Roald Dahl
- The Invention of Honey by Ricardo Sternberg
- Sonnet 24: Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelled by William Shakespeare
- The Last Laugh poem – John Betjeman poems
- Canzone by W H Auden
- The Convoy by Stephenie Tucker
- Наум Коржавин – О Господи! Как я хочу умереть
- St. Andrew’s Bay poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Спиридон Дрожжин – Песня пахаря
- Tu Fu – Tu Fu
- Robert Burns: The Gard’ner Wi’ His Paidle:
- Жан де Лафонтен – Ласочка в амбаре
- Ode to Mother Nature by Walter William Safar
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
- A Big Idea? by Satish Verma
- Twice Shy by Seamus Heaney
- The Tollund Man by Seamus Heaney
- The Perch by Seamus Heaney
- The Otter by Seamus Heaney
- The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney
- The Grauballe Man by Seamus Heaney
- The Early Purges by Seamus Heaney
- Testimony by Seamus Heaney
- Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney
- Song by Seamus Heaney
- Rite of Spring by Seamus Heaney
- Requiem for the Croppies by Seamus Heaney
- Postscript by Seamus Heaney
- Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney
- Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication by Seamus Heaney
- Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney
- Lovers on Aran by Seamus Heaney
- Limbo by Seamus Heaney
- Keeping Going by Seamus Heaney
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
