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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External links

Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus

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Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh

Poems in English 

• The Exeter Road poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The End poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Cyclists poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Cross-Roads poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Crescent Moon poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Coal Picker poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Coal Picker poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Captured Goddess poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Bungler poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Boston Athenaeum poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Bombardment poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Blue Scarf poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Basket poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Allies poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• The Allies poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Teatro Bambino. Dublin, N. H. poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Sword Blades and Poppy Seed poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell
• Sunshine through a Cobwebbed Window poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry by Amy Lowell

More external links (open in a new tab):

Russian Commerce Agency

Dealing Monster

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.

 

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