A poem by Alan Dugan
For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War, my father said.
The old wound in my ass
has opened up again, but I
am past the prodigies
of youth’s campaigns, and weep
where I used to laugh
in war’s red humors, half
in love with silly-assed pains
and half not feeling them.
I have to sit up with
an indoor unsittable itch
before I go down late
and weeping to the storm-
cellar on a dirty night
and go to bed with the worms.
So pull the dirt up over me
and make a family joke
for Old Billy Blue Balls,
the oldest private in the world
with two ass-holes and no
place more to go to for a laugh
except the last one. Say:
The North won the Civil War
without much help from me
although I wear a proof
of the war’s obscenity.
A few random poems:
- Владимир Корнилов – Репертуар
- Serendipity by Seema Gupta
- In Praise Of Limestone by W H Auden
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 45. The baby new to earth and sky poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- did you die, Ophelia? by Raj Arumugam
- World’s Sweetest Sister Of Mine by Miraj Patel
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня микрофона
- Dialogue Between a Sovereign and a One-Pound Note by Thomas Moore
- Duns Scotus’s Oxford poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- The Convoy by Stephenie Tucker
- Cornish Cliffs poem – John Betjeman poems | Poems and Poetry
- Михаил Лермонтов – Хоть давно изменила мне радость
- Василий Тредиаковский – Ну, так уже я не стал быть вашим отныне
- Wonderment by Siegfried Sassoon
- Sonnet X
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
- Playing With Big Numbers
- Percy Janes Boarding The Bus
- One Word
- Once She Dreamed
- O God
- Notebook Of A Return To The Native Land
- Night Words
- Negligence
- Mustard Flowers
- Meditation With Feet
- Love
- Little Talk
- Light The Festive Candles
- Levitation
- Labor Pains
- Labels
- Kalli
- Insect039s Nest
- In This Cul De Sac
- I See Chile In My Rearview Mirror
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

Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003) an American poet, a contemporary classic of American poetry.