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:
- The Shrine by Sara Teasdale
- 決定
- Гавриил Державин – На выздоровление мецената
- The Bard by Thomas Gray
- Владимир Маяковский – Слушай, шахтер!.. (РОСТА №843)
- Christmas in India by Rudyard Kipling
- Turn, O Libertad. by Walt Whitman
- The Change
- Юлиан Анисимов – Весенний дождь
- The Secret Garden by Rita Dove
- The Conditional
- Cult of Lynching by Satish Verma
- Владимир Высоцкий – Здравствуй, “Юность”
- The Scissors-Grinder by Vachel Lindsay
- Ode of Welcome by Oliver St. John Gogarty
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
- The Voice by Sara Teasdale
- The Unseen by Sara Teasdale
- The Unchanging by Sara Teasdale
- The Tree by Sara Teasdale
- The Tree Of Song by Sara Teasdale
- The Treasure by Sara Teasdale
- The Storm by Sara Teasdale
- The Star by Sara Teasdale
- The Song Maker by Sara Teasdale
- The Song For Colin by Sara Teasdale
- The Solitary by Sara Teasdale
- The Silent Battle by Sara Teasdale
- The Shrine by Sara Teasdale
- The Sea Wind by Sara Teasdale
- The Sanctuary by Sara Teasdale
- The Rose by Sara Teasdale
- The Rose And The Bee by Sara Teasdale
- The River by Sara Teasdale
- The Return by Sara Teasdale
- The Princess In The Tower by Sara Teasdale
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