Alice Fulton

Passion Vote

A fan drags its worship paraphernalia,
cameras, banners, to its shrine of slag.
It gives its soul
to whatever makes it shiver,
lobe to lobe.
Whatever it is it is
not a sham.
Its ambitions are modest,
it wants to say "I’m with the band,"
but its awe digs a hole in which
it stands lower and lower, ever more distant
from the distance it would bridge.
Because it waits in excesses
of scorch and snow
to see its god unfold
people think its frenzy
unsymmetrical.
Because a fan loves its love
through scandal’s bumps,
gifting it with trinkets,
too riveted to speak,
and doesn’t think it infradig
to settle for a blown kiss
or signed glance, but takes it
as sustenance, closing its
spans to greater
emancipations, entranced—
its god does not want its liege.
Its god wants those nonbelievers
over there, sitting on their hands.
Its god doesn’t know those withholders
want a fan: one who’ll lay
at their ordinary mortal
toes, a single, twisted, weirdly
crocheted rose.

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