by Alden Nowlan
A mysterious naked man has been reported
on Cranston Avenue. The police are performing
the usual ceremonies with coloured lights and sirens.
Almost everyone is outdoors and strangers are conversing
excitedly
as they do during disasters when their involvement is
peripheral.
‘What did he look like? ‘ the lieutenant is asking.
‘I don’t know, ‘ says the witness. ‘He was naked.’
There is talk of dogs-this is no ordinary case
of indecent exposure, the man has been seen
a dozen times since the milkman spotted him and now
the sky is turning purple and voices
carry a long way and the children
have gone a little crazy as they often do at dusk
and cars are arriving
from other sections of the city.
And the mysterious naked man
is kneeling behind a garbage can or lying on his belly
in somebody’s garden
or maybe even hiding in the branches of a tree,
where the wind from the harbour
whips at his naked body,
and by now he’s probably done
whatever it was he wanted to do
and wishes he could go to sleep
or die
or take to the air like Superman.

A few random poems:
- Infant Sorrow by William Blake
- Imitated From The Japanese by William Butler Yeats
- Владимир Набоков – Еще безмолвствую и крепну я в тиши
- Олег Григорьев – Вечером девочка Мила
- Unlike, For Example, The Sound Of A Riptooth Saw by Thomas Lux
- To Sleep poem – John Keats poems
- On His Grotto at Twickenham poem – Alexander Pope
- Sonnet 129: Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame by William Shakespeare
- Ode. Written On The Blank Page Before Beaumont And Fletcher’s Tragi-Comedy ‘The Fair Maid Of The In poem – John Keats poems
- An Epistle to A Friend
- The Ghost’s Leavetaking by Sylvia Plath
- Metaphors Of A Magnifico by Wallace Stevens
- On The Death Of The Bishop Of Ely. Anno Aet. 17. (Translated From Milton) by William Cowper
- The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden
- The Room by Mark Strand
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
- Infelix
- Hemlock Furrows
- Genius
- Fragment
- Dying
- Dreams Beauty
- Depths
- Battle Stars
- Aspiration
- Answer Me
- Adelina Patti
- The Nuclear Ghost Towns
- The Conditional
- The Ugly Little Bird
- Not A Star
- Mountain Wellhead
- Lightning In The Dark Night Skies
- In The Bus That Is Frantically Rushing From Cairo To Port Said
- Immoral Laboratories
- Hope
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