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:
- Shakespeare by Vachel Lindsay
- Twilight by Shaunna Harper
- Robert Burns: Ploughman’s Life, The:
- Robert Burns: A Stanza Added In A Mason Lodge:
- The Hanging Man by Sylvia Plath
- Birds Calling in the Ravine by Wang Wei
- Waly, Waly poem – Andrew Lang poems
- Sonnet 106: When in the chronicle of wasted time by William Shakespeare
- Ballade Of His Books poem – Andrew Lang poems
- EXISTENTIAL DILEMMMA by Satish Verma
- A Musician’s Wife by Weldon Kees
- From the Mountain by Wang Wei
- Farewell To Spring poem – Alfred Austin
- To A Picture Of Eleanor Duse by Sara Teasdale
- Юнна Мориц – На смерть Джульетты
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
- discovery.html
- day_dream.html
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- cinema_screen.html
- chaplin.html
- Cats by Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
- black_on_black.html
- black_morning_lovesong.html
- birch_tree.html
- betrayal.html
- bells_pool_and_sleep.html
- attack_on_the_ad_man.html
- any_man_speaks.html
- woken_up_by_beautiful_dreams.html
- was_then.html
- vestiges.html
- un-chien-andalou-an-andalusian-dog.html
- the_poet_angels_who_came_to_dinner.html
- the_nomad039s_vision_ode_to_a_skylark_dressed_in_black.html
- the_man_that_poetry_made.html
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.