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:
- The Rice Boat
- The Inheritance by Thomas J Camp
- market_square.html
- Is Life Worth Living? poem – Alfred Austin
- Miss Worthington by Rose Mary Boehm
- The Stwonèn Pworch by William Barnes
- Владимир Маяковский – Помните
- Robert Burns: Sweet Tibbie Dunbar:
- Wherever You Go, There You Are by Ryssel Guzman
- Виктор Шамонин-Версенев – Весёлый воробей
- Владимир Корнилов – Белые слоны
- As He Walks Away by Mahmoud Darwish
- Robert Burns: For The Sake O’ Somebody:
- To Him that was Crucified. by Walt Whitman
- Валерий Брюсов – Город женщин
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
- Innocence
- In The Stone I Rooted
- In Between The Strophes
- Human Joys
- Human Charms
- He Who Creates Re Creates Himself
- Hai Kou Unpublished
- Hai Kou
- Greek Light
- Greece
- Golden Eangle
- Gesture Theory A Villanelle
- Gem Immortality
- Fruit Leaf Roots Flowers
- First Verse
- First Light
- Excerpt From The Gertrude Stein Collaborative Series
- Eudaemonism In A Senryu Novel
- Drunkenness
- Do Not Get Angry
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.