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:
- Into The Twilight by William Butler Yeats
- Untitled II by Yunus Emre
- Oblivion by Satish Verma
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Я. П. Полонскому
- Rimmon by Rudyard Kipling
- The Blue Scarf poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- The Kiss — English Translation by Rabindranath Tagore
- Robert Burns: Address To The Shade Of Thomson: On Crowning His Bust at Ednam, Roxburghshire, with a Wreath of Bays.
- The Deserted Garden
- A New Year’s Gift, Sent To Sir Simeon Steward by Robert Herrick
- Composed During A Storm by William Wordsworth
- Lord God Have Mercy On Me
- Nothing Stays Put poem – Amy Clampitt poems | Poems and Poetry
- A Poem
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
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
- Not out of the running by Margaret Marie Hubbard
- Nevertheless by Marianne Moore
- Nearly A Valediction by Marilyn Hacker
- My Mother’s Body by Marge Piercy
- My Daughter at 14, Christmas Dance, 1981 by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
- Morning News by Marilyn Hacker
- Love Poem to My Husband of Thirty-one Years by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
- Locked Away by Margaret Marie Hubbard
- Labyrinth by Sera Jacob
- Iva’s Pantoum by Marilyn Hacker
- Island-Hearth by M. Ivana Trevisani Bach
- Irish Love Song by Margaret Widdemer
- Invocation by Marilyn Hacker
- If you should tire of loving me by Margaret Widdemer
- I Dream of my Grandmother and Great-Grandmother by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
- I Deserve It by Margaret Marie Hubbard
- Hurry by Marie Howe
- He Made This Screen by Marianne Moore
- Forever Closed by Margaret Marie Hubbard
- For the Young Who Want To by Marge Piercy
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
