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:
- English Poetry. Mary Wortley Montagu. Epigram, 1734. Мэри Уортли Монтегю.
- A Prayer to All the Dead among Mine Own People by Vachel Lindsay
- The Warning by Robert Creeley
- Огюст Барбье – Берега моря
- Владимир Луговской – Радость
- A Prayer For My Son by William Butler Yeats
- In Praise Of Henna by Sarojini Naidu
- Troopin’ by Rudyard Kipling
- Stop Looking For Broken Heart Poems and Quotes and Win Your Ex Back Instead!
- Letter To A Purist by Sylvia Plath
- English Poetry. Thomas Moore. From “Irish Melodies”. 58. Farewell! – But Whenever You Welcome the Hour. Томас Мур.
- Follies of War by Michael Levy
- Robert Burns: The Day Returns:
- The Raft by Vachel Lindsay
- Владимир Высоцкий – Сыт я по горло, до подбородка
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
- One Year by Sharon Olds
- Crab by Sharon Olds
- A Week Later by Sharon Olds
- 1954 by Sharon Olds
- Winter by Shaunna Harper
- Twilight by Shaunna Harper
- The Other Half by Shaunna Harper
- Saison Noir by Shaunna Harper
- River by Shaunna Harper
- Prelude by Shaunna Harper
- Passing by Shaunna Harper
- My Modern Surrealist Mind by Shaunna Harper
- Metamorphosis by Shaunna Harper
- La Fleur by Shaunna Harper
- Keeping the Dawn by Shaunna Harper
- In Measures by Shaunna Harper
- Hidebound by Shaunna Harper
- For Someone, Somewhere, In Relation by Shaunna Harper
- Ellipsis by Shaunna Harper
- Chanson D’Amour by Shaunna Harper
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.