A poem by Alan Dugan
The skin ripples over my body like moon-wooed water,
rearing to escape me. Where could it find another
animal as naked as the one it hates to cover?
Once it told me what was happening outside,
who was attacking, who caressing, and what the air
was doing to feed or freeze me. Now I wake up
dark at night, in a textureless ocean of ignorance,
or fruit bites back and water bruises like a stone.
It’s jealousy, because I look for other tools to know
with, and other armor, better girded to my wish.
So let it lie, turn off the clues or try to leave:
sewn on me seamless like those painful shirts
the body-hating saints wore, the sheath of hell
is pierced to my darkness nonetheless: what traitors
labor in my face, what hints they smuggle through
its arching guard! But even in the night it jails,
with nothing but its lies and silences to feed upon,
the jail itself can make a scenery, sing prison songs,
and set off fireworks to praise a homemade day.
A few random poems:
- Gigolo by Sylvia Plath
- Glory To God Alone by William Cowper
- Moment’s Indulgence by Rabindranath Tagore
- Song poem – Ezra Pound poems
- To Leonide Massine in ‘Cleopatra’ by Siegfried Sassoon
- How cruel are the parents by Robert Burns
- For The Country by Philip Levine
- Омар Хайям – Любовь роковая беда
- From The ‘Antigone’ by William Butler Yeats
- A Ballad of Footmen poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Hymn Before Action by Rudyard Kipling
- An Aquarium poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Sonnet 32: If thou survive my well-contented day by William Shakespeare
- A-Haulen O’ The Corn by William Barnes
- Out Of The Window poem – Aldous Huxley poems | Poetry Monster
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
- Teacher
- Sleep
- Ode To A Harmonica
- Intruder
- Do You Know What Its Like
- Hellcat
- Yours & Mine poem – Alice Fulton
- Woman In Front Of Poster Of Herself poem – Alice Notley
- Velocity Of Money poem – Allen Ginsberg
- The White Cliffs
- The Next Chance
- The Melancholy of Birth
- The islands of happiness
- The Internet Romance
- The End of the World
- The Terms In Which I Think Of Reality poem – Allen Ginsberg
- Tears
- Teachers Day special
- Succeeding Sentiments.
- Stalker poem – Alice Notley
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.