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:
- Madonna poem – Alfred Austin
- This Month The Almonds Bloom At Kandahar
- Михаил Лермонтов – Хаджи Абрек
- Алексей Толстой – Сижу да гляжу я всe, братцы, вон в эту сторонку
- A Work Of Artifice by Marge Piercy
- Fancy Dress by Siegfried Sassoon
- To an Intra-mural Rat by Marianne Moore
- Fields and Gardens by the River Qi by Wang Wei
- Germs. by Walt Whitman
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песенка про прыгуна в длину
- Villanelle: Oscar Victorius by T. Wignesan
- In Memoriam A. H. H.: 105. To-night ungather’d let us leave poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Гавриил Державин – На рождение царицы Гремиславы
- How To Achieve Self-Realization, The Mother of All Knowledge?
- Bermudas poem – Andrew Marvell poems
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
- Coal-Truck by T. Wignesan
- Cinderella by Roald Dahl
- blessing for sound health by matthew scott harris
- Black Lake by Memphis Knight
- Before The Law by Michael Major
- A Conceit by Maya Angelou
- A Rythm Upon Our Trusts by Michael McGovern
- Your Poems on My Patio by Martina Reisz Newberry
- Yesterday’s Mishaps by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Yes Dear by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Words Unspoken by Mark Olynyk
- Woman With Parasol by Martin Willitts Jr.
- Why Write? by Mark Olynyk
- Where Have We All Gone by Mary Etta Metcalf
- What is Poetry? by Mark Olynyk
- Wednesday by Marvin Bell
- To Sea by Martin Zakovski
- To Dorothy by Marvin Bell
- They Thought Her Crazy by Mary Etta Metcalf
- These Green-Going-to-Yellow by Marvin Bell
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.