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:
- A New Song by Thomas Chatterton
- Aftermath by Siegfried Sassoon
- The Pleasure of Princes
- The Demon by Shawn Ervin
- The Silence In The Church
- The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal’vin by Rudyard Kipling
- Late Autumn by William Allingham
- In Midnight Sleep. by Walt Whitman
- A Leaf for Hand in Hand. by Walt Whitman
- The Master of the Dance by Vachel Lindsay
- The Moods by William Butler Yeats
- Again And Again, However We Know The Landscape Of Love by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Lord when the wise men came from farr by Sidney Godolphin
- The Elphin Nourrice poem – Andrew Lang poems
- The Hands That Hang Down
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
- Sonnet LXIV by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet LXIII by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet LXII by William Shakespeare
- Sonnet LXI by William Shakespeare
- To the Fringed Gentian by William Cullen Bryant
- To a Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant
- To A Cloud by William Cullen Bryant
- The Yellow Violet by William Cullen Bryant
- The West Wind by William Cullen Bryant
- The Strange Lady by William Cullen Bryant
- The Skies by William Cullen Bryant
- The Living Lost by William Cullen Bryant
- The Gladness of Nature by William Cullen Bryant
- The Death of the Flowers by William Cullen Bryant
- The Death of Lincoln by William Cullen Bryant
- The Constellations by William Cullen Bryant
- Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant
- Summer Wind by William Cullen Bryant
- Spring in Town by William Cullen Bryant
- October by William Cullen Bryant
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
