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:
- tears.html
- Иван Барков – Венерино оружие
- Last Curtain by Rabindranath Tagore
- Up The Line by Will McKendree Carleton
- nominalism_is_a_liquid_kuhi.html
- Evening by Sappho
- Obdurant men, the worst of the abstinant by Miles
- You Must n’t Swim… by Rudyard Kipling
- Robert Burns: O For Ane An’ Twenty, Tam :
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Довольно
- Song of the Universal. by Walt Whitman
- The Snowy Spring Is Raging Mad poem – Aleksandr Blok poems | Poetry Monster
- Pan to Artemis poem – Aleister Crowley poems | Poetry Monster
- Огюст Барбье – Кьяйя
- Written In A Volume Of The Comtesse De Noailles
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
- Leaving Albania by Morelle Smith
- Komori by T. Wignesan
- In torque by Muralidharan Mudaliar
- In the Blaze.. by Muralidharan Mudaliar
- I Salute You , O Women! by Ms Tabzeer Yaseen
- I like to let the word fly about by Murali Sivaramakrishnan
- I a soul by Muralidharan Mudaliar
- Hunger and Thirst by Muhammad Dawood Jan
- Here by Muralidharan Mudaliar
- Haiku: The Bluebird and the Sky by Monty Gilmer
- Haiku: March by Monty Gilmer
- Haiku: January by Monty Gilmer
- Haiku: His Little Drum by Monty Gilmer
- Green Notes by Mrunmayi Mandan
- From the heart of your heart by Mukeshkumar Raval
- Forbidden Fruit by Mukeshkumar Raval
- Days and Nights by Murali Sivaramakrishnan
- Dark Room( qua vadis) by Muralidharan Mudaliar
- Crush by Muhereza Louis
- Cinquain on Love: Touch by Monty Gilmer
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