About Face poem – Alice Fulton poems | Poetry Monster

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 

• Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles by Alan Seeger
• Kyrenaikos by Alan Seeger
• With A Copy Of Shakespeares Sonnets On Leaving College by Alan Seeger
• Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty by Alan Seeger
• Vivien by Alan Seeger
• I Loved by Alan Seeger
• Virginibus Puerisque by Alan Seeger
• I Have A Rendezvous With Death by Alan Seeger
• Translations Dante Inferno Canto Xxvi by Alan Seeger
• Fragments by Alan Seeger
• To England At The Outbreak Of The Balkan War by Alan Seeger
• Eudaemon by Alan Seeger
• Tithonus by Alan Seeger
• The Wanderer by Alan Seeger
• The Torture Of Cuauhtemoc by Alan Seeger
• The Sultans Palace by Alan Seeger
• The Rendezvous by Alan Seeger
• The Old Lowe House Staten Island by Alan Seeger
• The Nympholept by Alan Seeger
• The Need To Love by Alan Seeger

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