About Face poem – Alice Fulton

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

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Poems in English 

• The Disquieting Muses by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Dispossessed by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Detective by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Death Of Myth-Making by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Dead by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Couriers by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Courage Of Shutting-Up by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Companionable Ills by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Colossus by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Burnt-Out Spa by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Bull Of Bendylaw by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Beggars by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Beekeeper’s Daughter by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Bee Meeting by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Beast by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Babysitters by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Arrival Of The Bee Box by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• The Applicant by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Temper Of Time by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
• Tale Of A Tub by Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

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