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:
- Lines Written In Dejection by William Butler Yeats
- Heavy Woman by Sylvia Plath
- In the Carpenter’s Shop by Sara Teasdale
- Николай Заболоцкий – Поход
- June by William Cullen Bryant
- 30th Birthday poem – Alice Notley
- Better Not Ask Me by Shel Silverstein
- Beside The Idle Summer Sea by William Ernest Henley
- Among All Lovely Things My Love Had Been by William Wordsworth
- Pharaohs, Protests and Public by Sunil Sharma
- Epigram to Miss Ainslie in Church by Robert Burns
- Some Clouds by Steve Kowit
- The Princess: A Medley: O Swallow poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- The Last Tournament poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Prelude: The Troops by Siegfried Sassoon
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
- In Every Language by Rifat Ilgaz
- I’m Sexy and I Know It by Aiyah De Torres
- I Write a Poem by Aiyah De Torres
- Girl Child – An Alternate Reality by Rekha Seshadri
- Elusive Lover by Renu Ayyar
- Crows and Hawks by Richard Schiffman
- Clever Stalk by Richard Schiffman
- Buddies by Richard Schiffman
- Buddha at Kamakura by Rudyard Kipling
- Beyond Darkness And Despair by Renu Ayyar
- Before you go a little way prospecting by T. Wignesan
- Are You a Thinking Man? by Rifat Ilgaz
- A Lost Friend, I Never Had by Renu Ayyar
- A Goddess by Tanisha Avarsekar
- Vacation by Rita Dove
- Tonight she remembers by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- There Came a Soul by Rita Dove
- The Emotion Line by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- The Bistro Styx by Rita Dove
- The Secret Garden by Rita Dove
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.